


Whispered Apologies And Professions Of Love In The Dark

by maureeeen



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Depression, Frerard, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Social Anxiety, Trauma, mentions of gross horror stuff but nothing graphic, some gang related violence, some sexual content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-07-07 12:58:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15908745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maureeeen/pseuds/maureeeen
Summary: "There was something odd about his friend and sometimes Frank thought he could figure it out just by staring at him for long enough."Frank likes Gerard. He likes being around him. But he also gives him the creeps and Frank's not sure why. Is it his fascination with horror, or does it go deeper than that? What are Gerard and Mikey hiding?They're both in their 20s, Frank's a hairdresser, Gerard a cartoon artist. They like to hang out.





	1. Chapter 1

It was hard to know for sure now because it'd been a while, but Frank thought that one of the first things he'd noticed about Gerard was that he had the most severe case of baby face he'd ever seen on a man in his mid-twenties. Now, he was a chubby dude. But there was no way his chubbiness was the only thing that made him look eerily like a nine year old in the wrong lighting. It was that his face was round, his cheeks wide, his mouth comparatively small, eyes big. Frank had asked himself time and time again why he felt so drawn to it. There was something odd about his friend and sometimes he thought he could figure it out just by staring at him for long enough. 

There was actually plenty odd about him. Gerard was a basement-dwelling, cartoon-drawing, taxidermy-collecting nerdweirdo who got shy when he hadn't seen you in a while, had trouble making eye contact and always spoke just a little too quietly. He barely let any sun into his apartment and neither did he leave it particularly often, it showed in both the way he interacted with people and in the way that he looked.  
His shoulders were usually drawn up too far, he would frequently duck out of your line of sight, not even wanting to be looked at directly. His clothes were all multiple sizes too large for him, obscuring his entire body from the neck down and a lot of the time when he got uncomfortable because people were staring at him, he'd nod his greasy hair into his face to hide behind. Since he had a tendency to live off of ramen noodles and whatever he could take home from the diner down the street, he looked unhealthy, too. Pale. He only ever visited said diner at night, just before they closed, hoping to find the place empty.  
Frank knew he had social anxiety and a fear of crowds but it was probably the lack of regular social interaction that had gotten him to this level of strangeness. His job he could do from home, and he lived by himself, having recently moved closer to NYC because sometimes, he did need to present his work to his boss or colleges. That was always a nightmare he only got through with ample amounts of Xanax. Still, something about him was just off. It wasn't just anxiety, or at least it didn't seem that way to Frank. He knew plenty of people with that problem, and they still weren't as weird as Gerard. There was something else, something quiet, something that made him feel weird whenever he was around him. He couldn't exactly put his finger on it but it was always there. 

In the beginning, it had presented itself as a twist in Frank's stomach. A slight disoriented nausea comparable to motion sickness. A hint of fear.

Now, Gerard was a very sweet dude. The thought of calling him gross or creepy made Frank feel incredibly guilty, was almost crushing.  
He kind of liked the feeling, too. Sought it out, it was almost addictive. The curiosity that had initially driven him to hang around him all the time had pretty quickly mixed with strong affection and attachment, making it all the more confusing and difficult to figure out.

What had not and would not ever help his case was how utterly obsessed Gerard was with the horror genre as a whole, but especially the more obscure, extreme sub-genres of it.  
Not too long ago, he'd told Frank about snuff films, for example. That you could find them on the deep web, along with a wide array of drugs and other illegal shit and that “no one actually knows if any of 'em are real. But if they aren't, think about it, then there's this whole production going on in secret and people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a ticket for like these fake 'live executions' that they watch on fucking deep-web skype or some shit. And if they're real -”, and his eyes had lit up in a way that had made Frank close his for a moment, sighing to himself, thanking the heavens that they were having this conversation at home, by themselves. “- and people can fucking pay extra to be able to vote what happens to the person that's being killed, like what kind of dystopian -”  
"What the fuck, dude."  
"No, but isn't that interesting? It's so fucked up! Obviously I hope they're fake, I'm sure they are -”, he'd waved his hand, dismissing the possibility that they weren't. “but kinda interesting, right? Like the fact that that exists?"  
“I don't know. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.”  
“That's what I'm sayin'!”

But, well. Frank thought that if a stranger observed him like he was now, lounging on his couch, one arm thrown over his stomach, his pinky poking into his chin while he chewed on the nail of his ring finger, his legs resting on Frank's thighs, they wouldn't think for a second that there was anything off with him at all. He looked cute. Very normal.

Frank blinked away from him but still caught the side-glance Gerard threw him, shaking his head just a fraction when Frank ignored the look he was giving him in favor of the tv show they were watching. It was some knock off true crime show, and getting back into it, Gerard once again began gnawing on his fingernail. They were talking about how this disappeared lady's family had suspected her husband to be abusive for years and how no one other than the victim's sister had ever dared to say something about it. She had, Laura was her name, done so at a Thanksgiving dinner, and the other attendees had met her objections with apprehensive silence, all waiting to see what Anthony would do as he slowly got up off his chair. Apparently the tension was unbearable because Gerard started to tap his foot against the arm rest next to Frank. He tutted at him. Gerard ignored him, so he gave a push with his thigh.  
“Leave me alone.”, came the reply, whiny and mumbled around his fingertip. Frank rolled his eyes.  
“It's annoying.”  
When he didn't stop, Frank shoved at Gerard's bedenimed legs, but the other had braced himself against it and since he was stronger, Frank didn't have a chance.  
“I'm gonna get sea sick!”  
“Don't be dramatic.”  
"You're shaking my whole body! I feel like I'm in a damn massage chair!"  
“And for free!”  
They starred at each other. It wasn't easy to keep a straight face to begin with, but Gerard, being the one with a younger sibling, had much more practice at it than Frank did. When the corner of Frank's mouth finally gave a quirk, Gerard, still holding eye contact, moved his legs. Stubbornly, he had continued to wiggle the one leg the entire time and only stopped now that he was lifting it over Frank's head.  
Gerard was leveraging himself against the backrest with his arm and Frank hid a smile by ducking out of the way of Gerard's legs. He came to rest his knees on the backrest so that his hip was turned towards the sofa. Stoically ignoring Frank, he'd focused his attention back towards the tv. Most of his face was now obscured by his own thighs.  
“Now I missed what he did.”, he said, quietly, and started wiggling his foot again. In annoyance, this time, probably.  
“Oh my God!”  
“What now?”  
“Your legs are right behind me, I can still feel that!”  
“So what?”  
“I'm gonna fucking kill you!”, Frank had turned towards the other, trying to confront him, and because Gerard didn't react, he grabbed the next best thing to throw at his face. It was the hoodie he'd taken off earlier and dumped next to the sofa. Gerard had turned the heating so far up it was like a damn sauna in the small, cluttered living room. The ceilings were low as well and so it got stuffy quickly.  
Gerard just giggled, pulled the hoodie off his face and stuffed it underneath his head, effectively using it as a pillow. Frank wanted to jump him. He'd never hit a person in his life and he wouldn't even know where to start, but God, was the impulse there.  
“If you don't get your -”  
Gerard laughed his high-pitched little laugh and the next thing Frank wanted to grab was the mug he'd drank coffee out of earlier. He huffed a breath and slammed his upper body back into the couch, now crossing his arms in front of his chest. He could feel Gerard's eyes on him but didn't give him the satisfaction of returning his gaze.  
“You're so mad at me.”, he said, quietly delighted, and Frank forced himself to take a deep breath instead of launching himself at the other. He couldn't help the grin that spread across his face, though. 

“We should dye your hair.”, Frank said. There was a commercial on where a man with the most chiseled jaw Frank had ever seen and eyes as twinkly as the two brightest stars in the night sky promised them that no one would even be able to tell that they'd covered up those pesky little gray hairs that were starting to sprout at their temples.  
"Huh? I'm not going gray."  
“No, but your roots are showing and it looks like shit.”, he said, spat the last part a little more sharply than he would have, had Gerard been less obnoxious earlier.  
He didn't say anything for a moment. “But it's two am.”, he finally settled on when he found he didn't have any other arguments against it. His natural hair color was brown but the black dye next to it made it look blondish and he knew it looked like he was going bald.  
“And? You're awake enough to annoy the shit out of me, you can sit still half an hour while I dye your roots.”  
“I don't have any dye.”  
“Walmart's open.”  
Gerard stared at him for a moment. Frank finally tore his gaze off the Lucky Charms commercial that was on now. The other was obviously tired, his eyes glassy, cheeks slightly flushed. Didn't look at all like he was keen on going out into the cold night. Frank wondered if he'd fallen asleep at some point after their little argument.  
"I don't wanna go to Walmart right now."  
Frank smiled, anywhere between sweet and sadistic.  
"And I don't want to keep smelling your feet.", he said, getting up off the couch. “But sometimes, we do things for the ones we love, and what I need you to do is to stop going out like that if people know full well your best friend's a hair dresser.” Frank was wiping chips crumbs from his shirt and pulled his jeans up by his stupid pink belt when he was done with his little speech. He hadn't meant it, of course not, and he knew that Gerard knew this, too. No, the revenge in this lay not in personal humiliation. This was purely about being a nuisance.  
“Best friend, huh?”  
Frank pulled up an eyebrow at him as he was undoing and refastening his belt. He'd loosened it a little earlier in an effort to make room for the last bites of his lasagna.  
As Gerard was getting up, he made a noise like an old man. “Don't oversell yourself.”  
“Not possible.”, Frank simply said, and Gerard laughed through his nose.  
As he pulled the hoodie on that Gerard had been snuggling with for the last fourty minutes, he caught a whiff of unwashed hair and laundry detergent. 

When Frank stepped outside, he felt like he was getting the first lung full of air in days. Gerard really needed to open his windows more often, but he wasn't gonna say that now, he already felt bad for how harsh he'd been about his roots. The other was walking around the car towards the drivers side, shoulders pulled up, chin close to the chest because it was cold and he was tired, but instead of some kind of gratification, Frank felt the urge to give him a hug. He was a sweet dude. And there it was again, while he looked at him getting into the car. This pang of – vulnerability? A sad sweetness. Some pull in him that made Gerard look endlessly small and told Frank that the guy was really, really doing his best and he ought to be as nice as humanly possible.

Frank cleared his throat when he ducked into the car. “We're getting chips too, yeah? You're out.”  
Gerard shot him a glance while putting on his seat belt. “You didn't bully me into going to Walmart in the middle of the night for chips, right?”  
“Not at all.”, said Frank, and hoped that Gerard didn't believe him.

He hovered while Frank was picking out a hair mask.  
“My hair's soft enough."  
“We need to refresh the color in lengths of your hair and it's gonna dry 'em out.”, Frank mumbled while reading through the list of ingredients on the back of the little tub.  
“You said we were doing my roots.”  
“We are, that's part of it. Have you been doing roots-only the entire time?”, Frank asked and tossed the hair mask into the basket on the ground next to him. He reached for a strand of Gerard's hair and held it up into the florescent light. The color really was badly done. He'd known this, being around him all the time, but he'd never payed close attention to it. It was patchy and looked very brassy in the light. He knew what he should do was wait until tomorrow, go to the salon and get Gerard some decent dye, but the other had told him on numerous occasions that he didn't believe in getting fancy stuff for his hair, because it was supposed to look a little grunge. Frank could respect that. It was definitely convenient at the moment, because Sally's was closed and he didn't really want to go to his place of work in the middle of the night when the next day was his first day off in ten.  
“I just kinda mush it in there.”  
“Mmh.”, made Frank in faux-recognition, smiling. He always found it cute when people did their own hair. It was freeing, he knew. He'd had his fair share of bad diy hairstyles before he'd started to work at the salon. Though his current cut really didn't require much technique, it was all pretty short as he was growing out his hair after having shaved his dreads off a couple months ago.

"You buyin' me booze?" Frank asked, turning around while he was already on his way to the alcohol isle.  
He sighed. "If that means we can go home soon? What do you want?"  
Frank rolled his eyes but he did pity Gerard, arms crossed in front of his chest, pulled deeply into his hoodie. It wasn't just that he was tired, it was the lights in the store and the fact that they were out in public, Frank knew he'd made him switch gears too quickly and too suddenly from being at home in peace to going out. He felt bad for making him come here. All because of a little feet tapping. It had been extremely annoying, though.  
"Dunno.", Frank mumbled, already on his way to the fruity liquors.  
They also bought gummy worms and cheese, cause Gerard was out of cheese, and Frank snuck some knockoff Froot Loops into the basket.

He was chewing those while applying the dye to Gerard's hair, who was feeding him. They'd gone into the bathroom to avoid staining the carpet and were listening to whatever CD had been in the CD player, Frank didn't know the artist, it was pop music which he barely listened to. He' turned it on with his elbow after it had gotten quiet in the small room and the acoustics in here were fantastic - Gerard had sung along in the beginning, before he'd apparently gotten too tired to. He looked like he was about to doze off, while Frank was wiggling as good as he could to the music while still applying the dye swiftly. When he nudged him with his hip, Gerard brought up his cupped hand and Frank ate cereal out of it – he felt a little like a horse, admittedly, but he was hungry, and hungry and tired were a bad combination if you had to focus at least a little bit. Gerard shoved the rest of the cereal into his own mouth.  
“How long til you're done?”  
“Ten minutes til I'm done applying this to your roots. We wait thirty, then pull the dye into the rest of your hair and wait another ten.” Frank was still dancing on his spot, mostly to keep his own spirits up.  
Gerard made a defeated “Oof”. and Frank once again felt guilty.  
“I'm so fucking tired.”  
“Sorry. You seemed fine earlier, what happened?”  
“I dunno.”, he said, straightened up a little, and sighed. The sigh turned into a yawn. “Must be the sitting still.”  
“You're gonna look hot, though.”  
Gerard laughed through his nose. “Yeah?  
"Yeah, full vampire-vibes, replenished."  
"I was gonna wait to do it after I've finished this project, since no one's gonna really see it while I have to draw all these strips still.”  
“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”, Frank admitted. And then, very small, said “Sorry.”  
“Nah, it's okay. This part's nice.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Uh-uh.”, Gerard nodded, yawning once more. “Yeah, 's relaxing.”  
“Aw.”  
“It's the waiting that sucks. And then, washing it out takes ages.”  
“I can wash it out for you!”  
Gerard snorted again. “You gonna get into the shower with me? I don't have one of those fancy hair washing-thingies.”  
Frank blinked a little at the thought and damn near said yes, but he didn't feel like this was the right time to open up about the very real desire he had to get naked with his friend.  
“You're right.”, he said, lame. Didn't mention that he could just do it in the sink, because that would likely be more uncomfortable than just showering.  
“Wouldn't be opposed to a head massage generally, though.”, Gerard said. “Just throwin' that out there.”  
Frank snorted. “Right.”

They had a late night, crawling into bed around four am finally, both buzzing because they'd had a bunch of the peach liquor that Frank had made Gerard buy while waiting for the dye to do its' job.  
“You know I love you, right?”  
Frank heard Gerard sigh in the darkness. “Yeah, I do.”  
“You know I was just annoyed because of the tapping earlier, right, I don't think you look like shit just cause your roots grow out.”  
The air got knocked out of Frank's lungs when Gerard threw an arm over him. “Jesus, I wanted to make you feel a little guilty, not - whispered apologies and professions of love in the dark kinda guilty.”  
“Aw, shut up! You're lying, you looked sad.”  
“Yeah. Best way to get Mikey to behave when he was little, figured it'd work on you too.”  
It was silent for a moment. Gerard pulled closer to Frank, he smelled like peaches and chemicals.  
“You're horrible.”  
“Mmh. You know I love you, right?”, Gerard mocked, but there was so much smugness in his tired voice that it sounded more like bragging than it did mocking.  
“You're a psychopath.”  
“What'd you call me that one time? Creepy girly fucker? I should make a list.”  
Frank kicked at Gerard under the covers and twisted out of his embrace.  
He slept much better having been relieved of his guilt than he would have, otherwise.


	2. Chapter 2

“Mikey still in there?” Gerard was rushing down the street, a few minutes late to the place they'd agreed to meet up at, meaning that Frank had been alone with Rob for roughly ten minutes, about three of which they'd actually spoken to each other for.  
For some reason, Rob didn't seem particularly keen on getting to know Frank, didn't ask follow up questions to what he said to him, nor did he tell him much about himself or what he was up to beyond “I'm good.”  
In the interest of fairness though, Rob didn't seem particularly invested in anything Frank saw him partake in, other than whatever he did on his phone - he was always pretty engrossed in that. Frank knew it had to do with his job but he had no idea what exactly it was that Rob did. 

One time, admittedly at a relatively noisy gig they'd all gone to, Frank had asked him what he did for a living when he'd reappeared after a phone call he'd said he absolutely had to take. He'd ignored him, turning his face straight back towards the stage.  
Rob was an intimidating guy. Tall, bald and bearded, buff. Not someone whose toes you really wanted to step on.

Still, Frank was curious. It was tempting to glance at the screen that was being held so unusually close to his face. They were leaning on a very large sack of debris that belonged to a construction site across the street. Its' lean-on-able surface wasn't that wide, so their hips were almost touching. Frank didn't have the guts to keep his eyes on the messaging app Rob was using for longer than a couple seconds, though. The app itself was unfamiliar to him and the only thing he knew was that Rob was talking to a bunch of different people, because the contact names Frank saw blurrily out of the corner of his eyes varied in length.  
Up until today, he'd assumed he was a dealer. It couldn't be that though. The reason Mikey had dipped into the basement of the supermarket that was being built across the street was to buy weed. Had Frank been right in his assumption, there wouldn't have been a reason for him to get it from somebody else.  
Still, it had to be something shady. Rob wouldn't be so secretive about it if it wasn't. Of course there was always the possibility that he just didn't like Frank. The guy could sell antiques for all he knew.

Either way, Frank was uncomfortable with how long they'd been standing here in complete silence. He'd been staring at the supermarket to be, hoping for Mikey to walk out of it almost the entire time. As he was wondering when and why he'd decided to ditch his original friend group to hang out with Mikey and his array of shady friends and acquaintances, Gerard appeared. 

“Yeah.”, Rob grunted in response to him after Frank had already nodded. It had taken him a moment to look up from his phone. He nodded at Gerard, who nodded back and shook his hand.  
Frank he gave a hug hello. “Hey. Sorry I'm late.”, he said, still close to his shoulder. Gerard looked, but didn't find a place to plant himself on the bag of debris, so he stood. Frank saw the curious glance he threw Rob's phone and wondered how much he knew about his work.

“How long's he been in there?”  
Frank looked to Rob since he himself had never even seen him. “'bout fifteen minutes?”  
“Oh, what? Why?”, there was clear concern in Gerard's voice.  
“Relax, he's with Stu, they're just fuckin' around.”  
“Huh.”  
Gerard's gaze lingered on the entrance to what was becoming the supermarket's parking lot. “Eh, I'm just gonna text him real quick.”, he said. His elbow kept brushing against Frank's upper arm as he was typing.

“What's under your nails, dude?”, Frank asked. Gerard's forehead creased slightly. When he checked, he did look a little shocked to see the state of them. Where the tips of his nails were splintered due to being bitten, something dark was sticking to them.  
“Chocolate popcorn.”, he said, distracted as he went back to typing.  
“Mmh.”  
“Got into my teeth.”, Gerard said.  
After hitting 'send', he slipped the phone into the back pocket of his jeans and crossed his arms in front of his chest.  
“So you had to dig it out using every single one of your fingers?”, Frank asked, his voice soft with endearment.  
To his surprise, he got an amused snort out of Rob.  
“Aw, come on. Probably not.” Gerard brought his hands up to chest-level in order to inspect them but seemed to reconsider after a moment. “You know, Frankie"-he began, still looking down-"sometimes I feel like this is a 'he teases you cause he likes you' kinda deal.”, he only looked up as he finished talking, and Frank was sure that he still caught the shocked look on his face. He felt as though he was unable to move for a moment. It seemed like a full minute to him, but in reality his retort only came about half a second too late. "You wish.", he said, his face scrunched up as if that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard.  
Gerard looked at him knowingly, smug almost, his cheeks a little pink.  
Thankfully, he couldn't keep up the eye contact and turned to focus on the supermarket entrance pretty quickly. Frank almost felt dizzy. He couldn't believe this greasy nerd was openly flirting with him and also somehow managing to be deadsexy while doing it. Something about the way he angled his body sometimes, how he moved his shoulders, how he looked at you with his jaw turned up, made him switch from the sweetest dude you've ever seen to intimidatingly attractive. He had to be doing it on purpose but Frank doubted that he was aware of just how good he was at it. 

“Mikey replied yet?”, asked Rob, and Gerard shook his head. When he realized the other had never even looked up, he said no.  
“That's a little weird.”  
Frank could see Rob's eyes fly up to the little watch on his screen, then to the entrance.  
“Want me to go check?”  
“If you would?”  
“Sure, dude.” Rob pushed himself off the bag and went ahead without looking back.

Gerard took his place.  
“You think there's something wrong?”, Frank asked him.  
He seemed to consider it. “Not really.”, he said, pushing some hair behind his ear after a gust of wind had knocked it into his face. “I know Stu. I don't know who else is in there, but they're probably just smokin' or something. You know Mikey, when he starts chatting…”  
“Yeah.”  
Gerard absentmindedly started to chew on his thumbnail.

“Do you know what Rob's deal is?” Frank wasn't sure if it was a good idea to ask, but he was very curious.  
Gerard seemed to think about it. “I do.”  
Frank looked at him.  
“Kinda.”, he said. “The gist of it.”  
Frank kept looking, carefully expectant, and Gerard turned his face to him. He considered his expression.  
“And?”  
“I'm not gonna tell you.”  
“Oh.”, Frank nodded. “Alright.”  
“Maybe he will. If you stick around.” Frank nodded again.  
That was fair. Gerard's face looked neutral. Sweet, kind of, but that was a given. He put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket.  
“So how was your week?”, he asked, sounding shy.  
They were still in the middle of the street. Diagonally from them was a bar with a bunch of benches outside that old rockers were drinking at. They were blaring some football game inside, the front door being held open by a big, sleeping dog.  
“Normal.”, Frank said, and he heard how quiet his own voice was from him trying to fit it into the space between Gerard and himself, not liking the idea of someone hearing their conversation.  
“I had a client on Wednesday that was kinda difficult.”, he said. Originally, he'd thought the story was funny and wanted to tell it, and though Gerard looked interested, he'd lost his enthusiasm. “Uh. She like, wanted this super light blue color, like sky blue, and I obviously couldn't do it cause her hair was dark, and -” 

“Hey Frankie!”, came a chipper voice from across the street, and Frank was thankful. He wasn't sure if he would have been able to tell the story in any kind of amusing way. Gerard's head turned at the same time as his.  
“What the hell took you so long?”  
“Hey, Mikey.”  
Rob was walking behind him, a hand on his shoulder, under it the strap that belonged to a backpack Mikey was wearing.  
Gerard pulled a pack of malboros out of his backpocket and stuck one between his lips.  
"Sorry."  
When Mikey was close enough, Gerard reached out a hand that the younger brother immediately shrugged the backpack into.  
"We started talking, I didn't even know I was in there for that long."  
Gerard swung the backpack over his shoulder. It was black, Frank thought it looked like it might be his. The color of it was fading, and there were patches on it where the material was wearing thin. Frank saw something bright blue peek through he thought was one of those plastic bags you could get at Ikea.  
Gerard started searching his jeans for a lighter.  
"Yeah, didn't look at your phone either."  
"Obviously not, that's rude. Frank, how are you?"  
The two hugged. 

Their little group walked a few minutes to where Rob had parked his car. They were going to a party one of Mikey's friends was throwing in a warehouse that said friend's father's firm had apparently recently abandoned. Frank was excited.


	3. Chapter 3

Originally, Frank hadn't wanted to come along. Not because he wasn't curious to experience, as Mikey had put it, one of Aiden's parties. He'd told him so many times already that they were awesome because he was trying to make it as a DJ, needed exposure and spent his parents' money on booze, catering and anything else you could possibly want for these events in order to lure as many people as he could. But Frank had work the next day. To which Gerard, who'd told him vehemently that he had to see this warehouse before the new owner would set up shop there next month, because it was "like something out of a 90's vampire flick." had said they wouldn't stay for very long. Because the reason they were going, and the reason they even had an invite, was that they needed to speak to a guy there that was extremely hard to get a hold of. Spencer. Apparently it was so hard that if Spencer told you to come to a party on a Tuesday night in order to do so, you just did it, no questions asked.  
Well, the Ways were going, Rob was coming, and Frank's excuse paled in the face of all this, especially since his workday wouldn't start until two in the afternoon and he would have plenty of time to sleep in.

Somehow still, Frank found himself alone long after midnight with a fresh cocktail in his hand, combing the place for someone cute to talk to. He'd seen a guy earlier that had caught his eye – very tan with a bit of scruff and a very round, bubbly butt in tight light wash denim.  
Frank didn't know where the Ways were. They'd excused themselves to go look for Spencer ages ago, Rob had disappeared immediately upon arrival, wordlessly, with a nod to the others. No one had told him who Spencer was and what they were seeing him about, and so if they were gonna keep him out of the loop, he was just gonna do his own thing too. 

Besides, Gerard had been right. This was a very cool place. There was only one room but it was gigantic, so tall that you had to push your head almost all the way back to be able to see the ceiling and three times as wide, entirely made of steel and windowless. The color of the walls was fading from deep red into black and back to red with slowly pulsating lights.  
The place was packed despite its size, this felt like a club, not a party some kid was throwing. The music was loud and mostly electronic, but a lot better than Frank had expected. He didn't know much about this genre but he didn't think that Aiden really needed to be doing all this in order to make people listen to it.

It didn't take long for Frank to spot jeans-guy. It did however take him about three quarters of his cocktail to build the confidence he needed to go and strike up a conversation. Secretly, he'd hoped that he would be harder to find or already talking to someone, so Frank wouldn't have to face the very real possibility of rejection. But, no. No such luck. 

He'd been very excited when the guy actually showed interest. Not because Frank thought he was unattractive, but the bullied kid in him unfortunately always expected for other people to.  
Pretty soon after he got over his initial excitement though, he realized that this guy wasn't really talking. And it wasn't because he was hard to win over, he was laughing, smiling, returning Frank's eye contact and light touches. No, it was because he was boring. Considering how beautiful he was, that was kinda fair, but Frank had to do all the work by himself and was exhausted after roughly fifteen minutes of trying his best to entertain. This wasn't helped by him being kind of tipsy. He could feel his own charm slowly slip away. 

So while he was halfheartedly trying to embellish a story he was telling to delay the inevitable crash and burn of this interaction, his eyes wandered. And like the gaze of a man dying of thirst would latch on to a well, his latched on to Gerard, who he spotted shuffling through the crowd and toward the exit. He felt the tension fall off himself immediately, thinking that maybe they were going home already, after all it had been hours since they'd arrived. Then he saw that Gerard was being followed by some dude. Was that Spencer? But Gerard was alone with him, and how likely was it really that it had taken him until now to find him?

Either way, Frank was not going to keep trying to make this happen if he could just as easily follow Gerard and this guy that might be Spencer but probably wasn't, outside.  
First of all, he was curious about why it was so important that the Ways see Spencer. If he just invited himself into their conversation, what were they gonna do? To his drunken and escape-seeking mind, this approach somehow made sense. Secondly, if Gerard was taking some dude out into the woods to fuck, he wanted to … well. Watch. Frank wanted to watch. Yeah, he was tipsy enough to admit that to himself. So he excused himself to the bathroom, hoping jeans-guy wouldn't spot him again or at least not until he was drunk enough to bear their obvious lack of chemistry. 

He'd seen a bunch of people smoke by the entrance when they'd arrived, so, after waiting a couple minutes to avoid seeming obvious, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes on his way there. Ready to act innocently surprised in the face of Gerard and this dude, should he find them right away, he stuck one in his mouth. Once outside he lit it, looked around, but didn't see a trace of the two. This was interesting because it meant that they weren't just out here to talk uninterrupted by the music, or take a cigarette break, it meant they were doing something that warranted hiding from the small crowd that had formed.  
It was also bad news because it was pitch black all around, safe for the entrances to the other warehouses which were each being guarded by security.  
Frank could have sworn there had been more lights out here earlier.  
The entrance to the woods was close too, stood like a tall, black wall a couple feet away. If you wanted to hide somewhere around here, you could. Frank didn't even know what direction they'd gone into, he didn't have a chance.

So he stood, trying to at least enjoy the silence and peacefulness of the night, the fact that he'd escaped the hell that was proving his attractiveness to someone, or whatever.  
There were more stars visible here than he'd seen in a while and it smelled like burning coals. About half a mile away was a gigantic steel complex with lots of towers and huge tubes connecting the many parts of it to the main building and each other. Multiple chimneys were pumping white smoke into the night sky. It was pretty, in an odd, sort of desolate way. 

Every so often, he scanned the surroundings for movement, but there wasn't any visible. It was too dark. He was just about to go back inside when he remembered that Rob's car was around the corner, and there was a chance Gerard had taken this guy there.

Frank still had a couple drags of his cigarette left so he made his way along the side of the warehouse, pretending to be seeking some privacy to make a phone call. He had his phone pulled out and ready to go once he turned the corner in case he'd get caught right behind it, getting more and more nervous the closer he got, but they weren't here either. There was a girl sitting on the ground and a guy standing opposite her who were talking to each other, and a little further away, some dude was squatting while talking on the phone, gesturing wildly with his free hand. 

Frank put the phone to his ear, and carefully looked up into the direction of the car. And, voila, there they were. By themselves. Not fucking though. Not even making out or touching at all, which was both disappointing and kind of a relief. 

Gerard was just now disappearing into the backseat of the car, which made Frank think that maybe he'd come just in time to witness something kick off. Despite the jealousy quietly but insistently nagging at him, the thought of Gerard in this situation was very hot. He thought that if he saw the other guy follow him, close the door, and the car give as much as a jiggle, he'd probably get hard.  
They were too far away for Frank to see any details, but he did see that Maybe-Spencer was watching what Gerard was doing with his arms crossed. The guy was of average height and built, wearing dark blue jeans and an olive parka. He looked remarkably regular.  
Before he could get the idea to look around and potentially catch Frank staring, Frank dropped his head so far that from their distance, it would look like he was staring at the ground. There was no way they could see the whites in his eyes and tell that he was staring at them.

Frank remembered the thrill he'd felt as a child when he'd broken into his neighbors' garden sometimes on his way home from school, just for the hell of it, just to walk across someone's well kept lawn. He'd always liked the feeling of almost getting caught doing something bad. The thrill had been nearly unbearable but he hadn't been able to resist seeking it out again and again. What he felt now was dulled by the alcohol and different in that it was much more real and felt heavier, but he still found himself completely entranced by it.

He felt some small spark of hope in his pants as the other guy moved to stand in front of the car door, blocking Frank's line of sight. Maybe Gerard would suck his dick. He couldn't see his pants move though and sadly, the guy stepped aside far too quickly for that, looking down for a moment and then stuffing something into his back pocket. Still, the thought made his knees a little weak and stuck to his mind.  
Gerard clumsily crawled out of the car not a minute later, and there was a moment where Frank felt, again, utterly frozen in place because he thought he'd seen him. He was still standing facing the ground, his eyes strained uncomfortably toward his eyebrows, he didn't think Gerard could possibly be sure that he was watching them but he was facing him exactly. The dude gave him his hand to shake, and the moment was over. Frank cursed himself for not having moved a little further down the side of the warehouse, to where he would be less easy to see from the car.  
His instinct was to immediately get inside before they could notice him for certain on their way back, but he thought that if Gerard had actually seen him, it would be much smarter to stay here and act clueless. So he did, his phone still in his hand, which was sweating profusely.

His anticipation was coming to a head, reaching the levels he'd felt as a child. He remembered the time he'd gotten caught trying to steal one of his neighbor's new kittens, how it'd felt as he'd first heard her voice scream at him, and how weak and numb his legs had felt as he'd run away. Not being able to move was torture. He wished he could escape his own skin. 

The two didn't end up getting closer to him than twenty feet. They walked diagonally from where the car was parked back to the warehouse entrance.  
When Frank slipped his phone into his pocket, the entire surface of it was wet. And it was black. And if Gerard had looked, he'd seen that. 

Frank had immediately turned to his right, not knowing where the hell he was going, but knowing that he needed to walk off the adrenaline. A billion horrible excuses shot through his head that all didn't make any sense. He had to hope that Gerard hadn't seen him, hadn't seen the screen of his phone, or that he would somehow, miraculously, not think he was a creep. 

He pulled out another cigarette.  
On his way back inside and headed for the bathroom, so he could look at himself in the mirror with his phone against his ear from the angle Gerard had seen him from, he saw what he was pretty sure was Rob in his periphery. His blood ran cold the second time this night and he debated maybe just locking himself in the bathroom and never coming out. He'd find a ride out of the woods somehow. Or maybe not, maybe he should just stay here, become a shitty warehouse cryptid. 

The amount of people in the bathroom that saw him posing weirdly in front of the mirror didn't make him hesitate for long. He thanked his own ability to go to a complete tunnel vision if need be. There was a small corner of the screen that was visible below his chin, but it wasn't much. There was always a chance that Gerard was drunk and hadn't even noticed the light that wasn't coming off it. 

Did he really have a choice other than to cling to that? He left the bathroom and went straight to the bar.

When he saw jeans-guy this time, he felt about as much relief as he had when he'd initially been given the chance to escape his company.  
“Met a friend on my way to the bathroom.”, he smiled, apologetically, and marveled at how easy it was now to pretend to be confident. Had to be leftover adrenaline. “Went out for a cigarette with him cause I hadn't seem him in a while. I'll buy you another drink.”, he said, and took the nearly empty cup of beer from him. Downing the stale, warm rest of it in one gulp, he refused to make a face, and hooked his arm underneath the other's. He'd forgotten his name completely the second he'd told him because of his nerves. Something with P, he thought. Paul. Probably not Paul. 

There was something about kneeling in the dirt with Paul's dick down his throat that calmed his anxiety, something familiar in his warm skin and his low voice humming and grunting as he used his mouth. He closed his eyes and palmed himself through his jeans. The shame of the previous ordeal had made him feel too shy to get it out initially, but after Paul had come to his senses, he insisted on finishing him off. Being jacked off by a skilled hand was alright but not nearly as satisfying as being on his knees and neither did it make his mind go as blank. Frank closed his eyes and pushed his face into the guys shoulder, trying to focus on the sensation. It was kind of difficult to reach an orgasm with how stupid and bad he felt and how sure he was that he'd just ruined the relationship he'd built with Gerard over the last little while. He probably didn't even want to be friends now. Who wanted to be friends with someone that spied on them? He felt like a complete creep.

He kept his head down when they went back inside and got another round of drinks, but after they'd clinked their plastic cups together, it was time to go. Frank didn't want to seem sad or weird after their interaction had run its course, especially after almost being unable to come, and he definitely did not want to struggle through more conversation. The reality of everything was crashing down on him so hard it was difficult to even look interested. He sat down on one of the leather couches and eventually, Mikey found him. 

He gave him a tired smile and raised the cup in his hand as a greeting as he plopped down next to him. “How's it goin'?”  
Frank didn't know if Mikey already knew what had happened, but he wasn't going to give up easy. There was no way he could admit to what he'd done, he had to deny it.  
“Good.”, he lied, hoping that Mikey was too drunk to be able to read him properly. “This is a cool place. I sucked a guy's dick in the woods.”  
Mikey laughing made him feel a little better, even if he scrunched up his face, clearly put off.  
“Great.”  
“Yeah. He was hot but really boring.”, Frank said, beginning to look around. “Maybe I can show him to you…”  
After a moment of halfhearted looking, he shrugged. “Hmm. Nah. 's not around.”  
Now he at least had a reason to avoid eye contact.  
“Have you seen Gerard?”  
“Huh?”, already used to being put on the spot and feeling defeated, Frank didn't react much. He turned to face Mikey. “Is he missing?”  
“I dunno, haven't seen him and he's not answering his phone.”  
Mikey seemed neutral. Not overly suspicious, if definitely inquisitive. As if his brother was missing at a party and he wanted to find him so he could go home.  
“I saw him go outside with someone earlier.”, Frank said, knowing that a good lie had to be based on truth.  
“Yeah?”  
“Yeah, some guy. I dunno, I thought they'd gone smoking and the hot-boring guy? He was being less hot, very boring, so I went after 'em to join 'em, but I didn't see 'em outside.”  
“Oh… 'd you see him come back in?”, Mikey asked, and got his phone out.  
“No, I wasn't looking though.”  
“I'll just call him again.”  
And so he did. Frank thought that he should probably feign some worry.  
“If G's missing we should start looking for him, we don't know if that guy's sketchy, right? It was a while ago, too. I didn't get a good look at him, but I'd recognize him, I think.”  
Mikey looked at him, holding his phone. “Yeah, let me just try this one more – oh!”, the relief in his voice sounded very real. “Hey, where're you at?”  
Mikey said Gerard had been looking for him, too, as he went back to his phone to text Rob. 

A couple minutes full of growing anticipation and sadness that Frank tried to get rid of by drinking nearly all of his most recent cocktail at once passed, and Gerard threw himself onto the couch next to him, eating fries from a brown paper bag and smelling of pot. He put an arm around Frank's shoulders, knocking his hand weakly into his jaw. Gerard moved so carelessly that Frank thought he was either really angry, or pretty drunk. Frank flashed him a smile during which he could feel his own eyes looking way too anxious and sad, and took the hand that was dangling off his shoulder by the wrist. He leaned into Gerard, trying to hide his face.  
“All good?”  
Gerard nodded. “Yeah, 's all good. I was talking to this really cute girl but she said she needed to pee, so. Now I'm just hangin' out.”  
He was slurring. Frank felt some relief but he didn't really think that Gerard had been drunk earlier. He'd looked pretty sober to him. At least he didn't seem mad now.  
“Didn't come back?”, Frank asked, teasing, but his voice sounded thin.  
Gerard shrugged. “I dunno.”  
He leaned his face against Frank's head, his skin felt hot.  
“Eh.”, he said. “Girls' bathrooms are always super crowded. Maybe she just took a while.”  
“Yeah.”, Gerard nodded, seeming completely disinterested.  
“What are you guys doin'?”  
“Nothin'.”  
“Frank sucked someone's dick in the woods.”, Mikey said. “I wanna go home.”  
Frank could feel Gerard exhale a laugh but didn't really hear it. “Yeah?”  
“Yeah.”  
“What'd he look like?”, he asked, close to his ear and curious. The proximity gave him goosebumps. Having heard the smile in Gerard's voice, Frank could feel his own anxiety ebb away.  
“Hmm...”, he leaned into him a little more, closing his eyes. Maybe, somehow, he actually didn't mind. Either way, Gerard was soft and warm and Frank was drunk and relieved, and he began to feel very, very tired. Though he didn't really want to think about what would happen when he would sober up.  
“He was hot…very tan, very nice ass. Had these big, dark brown eyes, the prettiest lashes. Well. Almost - yours are prettier.”, he said, quietly, hoping that Mikey wasn't paying attention. Gerard laughed softly. Frank thought he was probably scrunching his nose like he always did. Mikey did it too but it looked so impossibly cute on Gerard.  
“And he had a nice dick. Not too big, but girthy, you know? Kinda wish I'd had some lube, I'd let him fuck me.”  
Gerard laughed the same laugh again, quiet and breathy. “Out in the woods?”, his voice turned up at the end, almost giggly.  
“Yeah. Not too far out though.”, Frank said. “'s nice to hear the music.”  
This time, Gerard laughed properly, with some voice. Years of smoking made him cough at the end, so he leaned away but pulled Frank closer after, and Mikey got out of his seat. “I'm gonna take a leak, Rob says he'll be by the car in ten.”  
“Alright!”, Frank said, making his voice sound bright. He felt a little guilty. It couldn't be nice to witness your longest friend and your brother flirt all the time.  
“See you guys there.”, Mikey said without looking back. He didn't sound overtly annoyed, but not happy either.

“It's dope here, right?”  
"Yeah, you were right."  
They watched Mikey leave. Frank gripped Gerard's wrist a little tighter, he knew what was about to happen before Gerard even started to talk. 

“I know you saw me earlier.”, he said. Sounding mostly tired.  
“Mh.”, made Frank as his stomach sank. Just 'Mh.' So much for not giving up. But he couldn't fight it, this wasn't a question, Gerard was establishing common ground.  
“That was Spencer.”, he continued. Still speaking very close to his ear and slurring a little, but there was something heavy in his tone now as he was clearly trying to focus and get something across. “Mikey and Rob know what's going on.”, he said.  
“They know what he gave me and why and what I paid for it and what we talked about, but they don't know that you saw.”  
“Rob saw me.”, Frank said quietly and quickly. He was so relieved that Gerard hadn't told the others, he felt like he should be completely honest now.  
Gerard took a deep breath against his side. “He saw you outside? He wasn't outside.”  
“When I came back inside.”  
“But you took a while.”  
There was a tingle at the end of Frank's spine. So he'd kept an eye on him.  
“Yeah.”  
“Tell him you smoked and talked to someone on the phone, start thinking about what. You can't tell him you saw me.”  
“Okay.”  
“You would get in so much fucking trouble.", he said, and his voice sounded tired and sad. "Serious trouble. I know you're afraid of Rob, you wouldn't just go up to him and tell him anything, or ask him about this, right?”  
“No.”  
“You can absolutely not tell Mikey either. It's the exact same thing. Mikey loves you but this goes beyond that.”, his voice was almost pleading.  
“Okay.”, said Frank. "I promise I won't. I'm sorry.”, he was so overwhelmed by all this that that was the only thing he could come up with. And he was. He hated this. He felt like he'd somehow slipped into the wrong timeline. The only thing he really wanted was to forget this ever happened. He didn't even want to know what Gerard was up to, this felt way too serious.  
“Yeah. Don't do it again.”  
“I won't.”  
Gerard sighed. He took his arm off Frank's shoulder and gave his head a little shove from behind that almost felt encouraging, like something you'd do to a kid.

He pushed himself off the backrest of the couch. When he stood in front of Frank and held out his hand to him, he smiled his small smile, and looked sweet again. His eyes were soft. He didn't look mad at all. Just exhausted and still sad.  
Frank felt like he wanted to cry when he pulled him to his feet and into a hug. Gerard stumbled back a little but held onto him very tightly. He rubbed his back pretty hard for a couple seconds after he'd found his footing, trying to get him to losen up.  
“It's alright, just forget about this. If Rob asks me about it, I'll tell him I saw you on the phone but you were far away, alright?”  
Frank nodded. “Where was I?”  
“By the woods, to the right?”  
Frank nodded again.

He knew he had to tell him what he'd told Mikey but he didn't want to make himself sound completely fucking useless. He held onto Gerard's hoodie. "One more thing."  
"Yeah?"  
"Mikey asked me earlier if I saw you cause he was tryin' to get a hold of you. I told him I saw you leave with some guy and went after you to smoke with you but that I couldn't find you."  
Gerard sighed one of those deep sighs again. "Alright."  
"Is that bad?"  
"I dunno. Not if he believes you."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alright, after all the plot in the last one, this one is mostly made up of lighthearted discussions about ghosts, f/g interaction and hurt/comfort fluff.

The only thing Frank could think of that would help him calm down was to be around literally anyone but the Ways for a while. 

The night after the party he hadn't gotten any sleep, and instead worried about Rob coming for him and this side to Mikey that Gerard had referenced which Frank had never gotten wind of before.  
Talking about how he couldn't find out that Frank had seen the deal that Gerard had made with Spencer with a quarter of a football field worth of space between them because while he loved him, this, whatever it was, went beyond that. It was scary, and most of all it was frustrating in how confusing it was. 

He knew Mikey, since High School, as a sweet, fun kid that worked at a gas station, went to parties, and didn't do or care about much else. Until he'd been pulled into their closer circle via Gerard asking him to come along to things, Frank hadn't known that the Ways were involved in anything shady.  
He didn't think Mikey could hurt anyone, apart from him being a twig, it just didn't fit his character. So what the hell had Gerard been talking about, he would get into serious trouble if he found out? Was Mikey gonna rat him out? To who? Rob? And about what? 

Frank didn't have a clue what Spencer had sold to Gerard. It could have been a painting or a shirt or a god damn frying pan, he hadn't seen it. He could guess that it was something illegal, because why do it in the most shady, weird way possible if it weren't, but even that was speculation. He knew absolutely nothing. 

He told himself all this over and over again, muttered about it under his breath while making breakfast, in the shower, and thought about it on the bus ride to work, where he caught himself making faces and gesturing as he imagined an argument with Mikey about all of this which, in his mind, he could not lose. He tried to rationalize the anxiety he felt about it away, and yet he was genuinely scared of what might happen because of how serious Gerard had sounded.

Above all this Mikey-business that made him feel like he was losing one of his best friends, Rob had seen him, and Rob was a different story entirely.  
He scared him. Frank couldn't gage what he would do about it at all, should he consider it an issue. That was still complete nonsense in Frank's mind, but he didn't feel like he could really argue with or talk to Rob the same way he would be able to with Mikey.  
On the car ride back to everyone's respective homes, he'd seemed tense, but Rob always seemed tense. This was driving him up the wall.

So he decided that it was time to put all of that aside and catch up with some of the friends he'd neglected over the last few months. And while those of them that had texted him back were around him, they kept his mind off things, he found himself relieved of his worries and happy. But the minute he was alone again, he not only started to feel empty and to brood over this, he also missed Gerard. 

His easy company, hanging out with him on his couch, watching bad TV and eating junk food, going on walks, going to see a movie. Being around him felt like a lazy afternoon in the sun and even just a week without it was sad and dark. 

He didn't know how Gerard felt about what had happened after he'd sobered up, though. He hadn't really been texting him at all, apart from asking if he wanted to hang out twice. And Frank was aware he was a coward for it, but he didn't want to confront any of this.  
Most of all maybe, he didn't want to think about the possibility that the Ways might actually be very bad people. He tried to imagine them doing something illegal that was positive and didn't hurt anybody, and all he could think of was stealing from large corporations and giving to the poor and maybe sabotaging the local conservative party. No matter how likely he managed to make himself find either of those scenarios, he was back to pondering seconds later, and none of it was helping. 

Eventually, Frank came to the conclusion that he didn't want to just stop hanging out with the Ways, and that that meant he would have to face whatever this was and see where it would go.  
So on another sleepless weeknight, he texted both Gerard and Mikey to ask if they wanted to hang out.  
He didn't get an immediate response from either and shoved his phone back under his pillow, but there was something calming about reaching out anyway. 

 

“The Bella Muerte?”  
It was 10 pm the next night, they were hanging out in that diner Gerard liked to avoid when he saw more than three people in it and Frank was staring, he knew he was, and he also knew he looked pretty stupid doing it cause he'd spoken around a mouthful of burger.  
Gerard had introduced the girl sitting next to him as Yana about an hour ago and Frank still wasn't sure about her.  
“Why would you do that? Everybody knows that place is cursed or whatever. Like not just haunted, cursed. People die there all the time.”  
“Like six last year.”, Mikey agreed, nodding. “I've been telling 'em for days not to go.”  
“You shouldn't. Can't you go ghost hunting somewhere else?”  
“It has most activity out of all places here. If you know what you're doing, it's not dangerous. Those people probably offended spirits very much, or more likely were squatters that would have died anywhere. Or maybe bodies got dumped after they were killed somewhere else, who knows.”, Yana said and took a sip of her coke. She spoke with a relatively strong accent that Frank had earlier mistaken for a Russian one. She'd told him she was actually Czech and that the Russian accent was far harsher than hers and, yes, her English did sound sort of smooth. It was pleasant, especially spoken in the deep voice she had that Frank guessed was that way because she was a heavy smoker. 

“Th-that's another thing, exactly! Who the hell knows who uses that place! I saw a documentary about cults on the east coast and they said you should always stay away from abandoned buildings, especially at night, cause people do weird rituals there.”  
“There's gonna be three of us, Frankie.”, said Gerard in an even, calm tone. He had put his hair into a ponytail so that it wouldn't get in the way of him eating his burger, and Frank thought it was unbearably adorable. “I mean, five, if Mikey and you come along, but I'm guessin' not.”  
“Yeah, absolutely not.”, Frank said, and took another fairly large bite, provoked entirely by the level of his outrage.  
“I'm not goin' anywhere near that place, I've been tellin' you that for years.”, Mikey said. He looked at his brother over the rim of his glasses while eating fries off Frank's plate. Frank pushed it a little more toward the middle with his forearm.  
“We should have a movie night.”, he said from behind a hand he held in front of his mouth, which Mikey agreed to avidly, nodding.

“Alright.”, Gerard shrugged. “I'm just sayin' no one's going by themselves.”  
Frank thought, yeah, it's two pretty girls and your weak ass, but he didn't say that.

“You should always trust your gut.”, said Tracy. Tracy was a short, chubby southern girl with seemingly endless strawberry blonde curls, half of which she'd pulled up. Some of it was falling into her face and Frank had complimented her on it far too often already. She was smiling warmly at him. “If something repels you that much, it's probably for a reason.”  
“Thank you.”, Frank mumbled around his food.  
Tracy was Yana's girlfriend. Apparently Gerard had known the couple for years and they visited each other every once in a while to go on these ghost hunting adventures.  
When Frank had asked the Ways to hang out, Gerard had texted him first, saying he had friends over at the moment that he thought he should meet. Frank hadn't been too keen on the idea initially, not wanting to get more involved in the Ways' weirdo brigade than he already was, but realized pretty quickly that this was the ideal scenario, as having other people around might dispel some of the tension – he didn't think it was likely they'd get into what had happened at the party this way. 

“Have you ever seen a ghost?”, Tracy asked him. “Or something like that?”  
“I dunno.”, Frank said. He looked down at his plate for a moment while swallowing the rest of his bite, and considered how open he wanted to be with these two people he'd never met before.  
“Maybe. I see things out of the corners of my eyes sometimes, you know? Like, shadows about the height of people. Then I look, and they're gone,”  
Gerard's head was cocked slightly to the side as he was listening, the other two seemed interested as well. “But I think everybody kinda gets that sometimes? When you're stressed or tired or whatever?”  
“I definitely get that sometimes.”, said Mikey, and ate more fries. As long as this conversation had gone on for, Frank had been able to feel the annoyance coming off him in waves, even though he tried to conceal it. Frank felt for him, but it was also pretty funny. He wondered if the girls knew him well enough to notice it.  
“Like, just for a second?”, Mikey clarified.  
“Yeah.”  
“Yeah, that's definitely a thing.”, he nodded, trying to seem casual. He so obviously avoided to make eye contact with Tracy and Yana though, it wasn't convincing at all.  
Frank glanced at Gerard before he took another bite. He smiled at him as if he knew exactly what he was thinking in regards to his brother.  
He looked happy, like he was comfortable between his two friends, his cheeks pink and his eyes very awake.

Tracy laughed softly. “We were talkin' about this last night, you know. People who don't believe in the supernatural will try to justify the craziest things in the weirdest ways. You see shadows of people passing you by and you think it's cause you're tired?”  
“I didn't say shadows of people.”, Frank clarified with a smile. “Just the height.”  
“Oh, alright, I'm sorry, carry on.”, she sounded a little patronizing and Frank briefly considered to tell them that that was all, but that wasn't true, and he didn't exactly get many chances to talk about these things. It seemed like these two kind of knew what they were talking about, too. Well. As much as you could know what you were talking about in regards to the paranormal.

“Sometimes when I try to fall asleep, I know it sounds stupid, but I hear these voices. Like, a lot of them, just chatting all at once. And it's not that I'm dreaming, I'm still awake, right. Sometimes I try to listen to a single person but I never really manage to without either falling asleep completely or waking myself up.”  
“One time I heard a lady tell her daughter about a washing machine … It sounds like they're all in a busy cafe or something, talking over each other. Like, they're in the hundreds. I dunno, I read it's a pretty common kind of hallucination that has to do with sleeping, but sometimes I think it's ghosts.”, he said. “That's it though. No sexy shirtless dudes making vases out of clay or something.”  
Tracy grinned.  
“I've got nothing falling off the shelves. I kinda wish, you know? I feel like it'd be cool.”  
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”, she said.  
“Yes.”, said Yana. “If you're not so sure about the paranormal, you want concrete evidence.”  
“Yeah, exactly.”  
“That is pretty cool, though.”, said Gerard. “How come you never said anything about that?”  
“Never came up.”, Frank shrugged. “I didn't want you thinking I was crazy.”  
“Oh...”

“Sounds like you could be psychic.”, Yana said, very straight forward and unblinking as if she was completely serious.  
Frank felt Mikey purposefully bump his bony leg into his while he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He tried not to laugh, because he didn't want to offend anybody.  
“Yes, I was thinking that too.”, Tracy nodded.  
Frank immediately shook his head. “No. I mean, I really don't think so. I think I'd probably, like, know if I was psychic.”  
“Uh, not necessarily.”, said Tracy, and put her napkin onto the table. “You know, you have to develop those abilities. It's a lot of work and usually takes a very long time, but it is worth it.”

“I don't know.”, Frank said, who really, really didn't think he was psychic. The ghost-theory seemed much more likely to him. He was about to say so when Mikey, who'd been googling 'hearing voices while falling asleep' triumphantly said: “Hypno-gogic? Or hypno-, hypnopompic hallucinations! That's what they're called, it says here it's pretty common, so.”  
“Yeah.”, nodded Frank and leaned over to take a look at the Wikipedia article Mikey had pulled up. “I think that's what I read too, it says -”

“Oh, just because people have made up a scientific name for it doesn't mean it's not supernatural.”, said Tracy, and made a swiping gesture with her hand.  
Yana agreed with her.  
Frank couldn't help but flinch at being interrupted in such a crude way, feeling kind of annoyed himself, and thinking that Mikey must have absolutely had it. Mikey sighed and laid his phone face-down on the table. “I don't know.”  
Because he couldn't look directly at him, Frank sat next to him and felt that would be too obvious and escalating the conflict, he looked at Gerard, whose eyes shifted to him briefly. He looked somewhere between amused and expectant and had his bottom lip in his mouth.  
“I can't prove that it isn't.”, said Mikey.  
“But, I dunno, seems unlikely to me that Frank's reading people's minds when he's alone in his apartment and the next cafe is like, half an hour away and also closed at night cause he lives in the middle of nowhere...”  
“Well, he's probably not doing that.”, said Tracy, nodding, confused and on the edge of being irritated. “But he could be tapping into thoughts people around him have.”  
“This impression that you are having of this cafe environment could just mean there are many spirits communicating or existing and thinking around you. You could be listening in. I heard of this before.”, said Yana, thoughtfully. Tracy made an ah-noise in acknowledgment. 

To his own embarrassment, that kind of resonated with Frank. He met Gerard's eyes once again. He looked excited. “That it?”, he asked from behind his hand.  
“I dunno, kinda makes sense?”  
Gerard grinned. “That's so cool! You should come along tomorrow.”  
“I dunno. I'm game for ghost hunting, just not there.”  
“Aw, man….”

“I mean, I always thought, you know, if you think about it-”, Frank felt like he was backstabbing Mikey, but he found it refreshing how seriously Tracy and Yana were treating this topic. He had a bunch of ghost related theories that he kind of wanted to run by them. “-if souls don't go someplace else after they die and they just hang around, there have to be billions of ghosts around us all the time, cause so many people have died, right?”  
Tracy smiled again, almost kind of proud. “You're right! There are a lot of theories about how long souls stay around for and why they don't move on and where they go, I can recommend you a pretty good book about this.”  
“That'd be dope!”

“I mean, but, it could always just be the sleep-thing.” Mikey wasn't trying to sound passive aggressive, Frank could tell he was aiming for neutral.  
“Yeah, no, you're right, it could be.”  
Frank shoved some fries into his mouth. He chewed for a minute, thinking.  
“Mikey, you agree on the aliens-thing, I don't get why-”, started Gerard.  
“No. The aliens-thing is completely different.”, Mikey said, obviously not feeling like he needed to be diplomatic with his brother. “Look, the universe is huge, like, factually, it's straight up stupid to think we're the only ones, but ghosts? When something dies, it's dead, I just don't believe in souls. It just sounds like such bullshit, I'm sorry.”  
Gerard threw his hands up and Frank giggled. “It doesn't have to be ghosts, it could be like, completely different entities that we just can't perceive-” Tracy and Yana were nodding at him and Frank felt stupidly proud about it. Gerard looked very happy, which he felt even prouder of.  
“Frank...”  
“I guess we won't solve this in one night.”, said Tracy, finally, and Mikey agreed immediately. “No, we won't. And I don't mean to shit on you guyses believes and, shit, careers, I just don't believe it.”  
“It's totally fine. We never want to convert anybody -”  
“Wait. You're professional ghost-hunters?”  
Gerard laughed at Frank's excitement, seeming delighted. He was leaning back, one arm across his torso, the elbow of the other leaning on that one, his face squished into his fist.  
“No, no.”, said Yana, smiling. “We have a small shop where we sell crystals, books, things like that.”  
“Oh! That's cool too. So you guys are like, what, witches? Kinda?”

At some point in their conversation, Mikey got up, went to the bathroom for a good few minutes, and finally asked if everybody wanted ice cream.  
“Aw, dude, yeah, but I can't eat a whole one.”, said Frank, who was as happy in this company now as he possibly could be. Mikey said he'd share with him. Tracy went along to the counter because she wanted a specific sundae, and Frank could see them bond a little while they were waiting in line. The mood was pretty much restored after everyone had some sugar, though Mikey remained sort of quiet.

Around midnight, Gerard drove everybody home.  
First, he dropped off Tracy and Yana at his place, who complained they were too stuffed to even make it up the stairs, then Mikey who gave his brother a quick hug and told Frank to come by his place tomorrow evening. Frank felt weird letting him go inside all by himself and debated getting up, just because he felt like there was something to reconcile here. But Mikey was too quick, and Frank thought they could always do that tomorrow. The night was cold, anyway, and it was comfortable in the car.

It was still odd, seeing Gerard drive. He'd driven Mikey and him around a little sometimes when they'd still been at school, and then later, when they wanted to go see a movie late at night or something, but Frank had always been in the backseat with Mikey, feeling shy around his big brother.  
Sitting next to him was different, and Frank still wasn't entirely used to it.  
Gerard was a safe driver, very watchful. Sometimes, when he knew an area well, he nodded along to whatever music was playing, sometimes mouthing the words or even humming when he was in a particularly good mood. It was cute, but then Frank thought everything he did was cute. 

He was wearing his black hoodie, the sleeve of the left one pulled far over his hand, trapped between his palm and the steering wheel. His ponytail was coming apart, now really only hanging on by a couple of strands, and he had these oversized beige pants on that seemed to have more paint on them every time Frank saw them, which he thought was artsy and punk and therefor very cool.  
“Are you starin' at me?”, Gerard asked, small and smiling.  
“Oh.”, Frank blinked himself out of his admiration and crossed his arms, pulling them close to himself. “Yeah.”, he said. “You're cute drivin'.”  
Gerard snorted softly and pulled his right arm up but didn't really have anywhere to put it, so he put it onto the steering wheel after hovering for a moment. “Thanks.”  
Frank thought he might melt. He felt like his heart was about to start pouring out of his eyes and mouth and ears in the form of some kind of gross crush-goo. He pushed himself further into the seat.  
“Cause you're so focused. I dunno. It's cute. With your little … hoodie. I dunno.”  
Frank laughed at himself and Gerard joined in, scrunching up his nose. “Thank you.”, he giggled.

“Uh, but it's really distracting.”, he said, finally. “Especially if you're being so quiet. You could tell me somethin'.”  
“Sorry.”, Frank said, still grinning. "Hhm, I liked Tracy a lot? She was cute.”  
“Oh, yeah, right?”, Gerard nodded. He seemed relieved. “She's adorable, I love her. Yana's been with her forever. I think like five years.”  
Frank thought his voice sounded a little shaky.  
“That's so nice...”  
“I know...”

There was a weird, tense silence then and Frank rubbed both his hands over his face trying to get rid of it. They were so completely fucked, both of them. He felt like there were magnetic ants crawling all over him, but in a nearly intolerably sexy way.  
“So, you go ghost hunting often?”, he asked, like some sleazeball at a bar. “How has this never come up.”  
“Uh.”, Gerard carefully turned into the street Frank lived on. “Not really? Sometimes. Mikey and I used to go to these abandoned buildings, but sometimes we'd see weird people there and then we stopped, but I was always kinda hoping to see a ghost. I really only do that with Yana and Tracy, don't know anybody else who's into it. 's sad they moved.”  
Frank nodded. “Yeah, that sucks. I'll go with you! I would have maybe come tomorrow too cause Yana and Tracy seem to know what they're doing, but I dunno, Mikey seems mad that I'm spending so much time with you and not him, lately.”  
“I know.”, Gerard said, quickly. “He's annoyed about it. He's sayin' I'm stealing his best friend.”  
“You're not...”  
“No, but I dunno, I get it. You're important to him.”  
“Yeah. He's important to me too.”  
“I know he is.”  
Frank swallowed and studied Gerard briefly from the side, unsure if he was going too far. “It's just, I'm excited about this, you know?” He was holding his breath.  
Gerard pulled into a parking spot and spoke without looking at Frank. “Yeah. Me too.”, he said. His voice fell flat and he wasn't looking at him.

The tension between them only got worse as they both climbed out of the car. Frank had told Gerard earlier that he should stay for a cup of coffee cause the view was nice from his balcony this time of night, but he kind of regretted it now. What he really wanted to do was give Gerard a quick kiss on the cheek, just for the statement, and then make a run for it, because this static between them made him feel like he was suspended somewhere between heaven and hell, feet all the way up in the air.  
Frank thought that he could see Gerard's fingers shake from where they were poking out of his sleeves. It only made it worse.

“Can you put my desk chair on the balcony?”, Frank asked him as he was kicking his shoes off next to the front door.  
“I'll make coffee and bring the one from the kitchen, alright?”  
“Yeah.”, Gerard nodded and ducked into his bedroom like he was running away.  
Usually, Frank berated people for going into his apartment with their shoes on, but he was extremely far from caring about that right now.

When Frank found him, Gerard was curled into his chair, ankles pulled all the way up to his thighs and his arms around his knees. “Aw, man, are you cold?”  
Gerard looked up with large eyes when Frank reached out to hand him his cup. “Kinda.”, he said. “Thank you.”  
“Hold on, I'll get you a blanket.”  
He could see how something around Gerard's eyebrows relaxed and mentally congratulated himself for remembering that the dude loved to hide.

“This is nice, huh?”, he asked, when Gerard was sufficiently muffled up and they were both looking over the lights of the city. There was exactly one upside to living in the outskirts of Newark, and this was it. Frank loved spending his nights in this spot. Sometimes he took his laptop and watched movies, or played guitar out here.  
“It is. I dunno why we always hang out in my horrible apartment if we could be here.”, he said. “'s so much nicer.”  
“Cause you have a tv.”, said Frank. “And it's annoying to come all the way out here. Plus, it's nice at your place. Cozy. I like it.”  
Gerard nodded.

“I'm terrified.”, he said, after a moment of silence, in which Frank had asked himself how it could be possible that it was so hard to talk all of a sudden.  
Gerard was looking straight ahead but his hair was hiding most of his face safe from his nose because of the angle Frank was seeing him at.  
First, he hadn't been able to process what he'd said. Then it felt like his heart got stuck in his throat with excitement and he wasn't sure how to reply. He studied him for a moment, seeing how still he was. It looked like he wasn't even breathing.  
“I know, dude.”, he finally said, quietly.  
After a moment of consideration, he continued. “But it's just me. You don't need to be. Like, at all.”  
Gerard exhaled a little weirdly and put his free hand on his face. “Just you. That's funny.”  
It was so painfully obvious now how hard this was for him. It pulled on Frank's heart in a way that almost made him flinch physically, and feel queasy in the way Gerard sometimes made him feel.

He reached behind himself to set his cup of coffee down on the dusty metal windowsill. When he got up, Gerard looked at him somewhere between surprised and spooked. Frank smiled, going for reassuring, and pushed his chair further toward his. When he sat back down, he put his head on his shoulder like he always did, and laid his hand, open palm up, on the armrest. “Gimme your hand.”, he said.  
Frank could hear how thick his own voice sounded and cleared his throat. He'd never had a crush that had seemed so unlikely to work out suddenly look like it was working out. It felt like he was in some weird dream. Every time he looked at Gerard, he couldn't believe it.

Gerard awkwardly pulled his hand out from underneath his blanket. “'s sweaty though.”, he said, quietly, and Frank pushed his face into his arm. “I don't care, man, so's mine.”  
Gerard's hand was indeed warm, sweaty, and weak. Frank felt a slight tremor in it that Gerard tried to correct by angling his wrist differently but he seemed to give up on that pretty quickly, sighing as if he was frustrated with himself. Frank pulled his other hand up to cover Gerard's with. 

“You know, I don't think you realize how much I really like you.”, he said. Maybe it was cheesy, and there was a good chance it was too much, but it was the best he could do.  
“Really?”, asked Gerard. He was looking down at their hands, his voice flat in the same way it had been in the car.  
“Yeah. I don't think there's much you could do to make me dislike you. Or anything, actually.”  
Gerard was quiet. “'s nice.”, he said. He started to say something else, but stopped himself.  
“You know, apart from the obvious stuff. Being a serial killer, or …”

To his surprise, Gerard laughed. “It's not that.”, he said. There was finally some relief in his voice. “I promise.”  
“Yeah, figured that much.”, Frank lied.  
“It's just – could you – I don't even wanna know, I'm pretty sure. But. Can you tell me on like a scale of one to ten how bad it is?”  
Frank held onto Gerard's hand a little more tightly, his thumb digging into his palm.  
Gerard was quiet for a moment, obviously thinking. “Bad how? Like, morally wrong, or-”  
“I just mean, like, do you hurt people? And if so, how bad-”  
“No.”, Gerard said and sounded very decisive. “Never. I actually jump through a lot of hoops to make sure I don't. What I got from Spencer was part of that.”, he said, and looked at Frank as though he wanted to make sure he understood him. Frank could feel his own eyes look hooded and hazy like eyes do when you look at someone you love. He also knew his cheeks were bright red but thought that it was too dark out here for Gerard to see that. He seemed to notice the look on his face though, as his eyes caught on it for a moment where he just stared silently. Something in them shifted from anxious toward vulnerable. Maybe hopeful.

Frank nodded slightly. “So, like, a one...”  
Gerard giggled again when the penny dropped, sounding genuine, and leaned back into his chair. “Maybe a two or a three.”, he said.  
“You wouldn't like it, I don't think, but no one gets hurt.”, his voice got more serious again. “No one even knows about it like ninety percent of the time. Unless something goes wrong.”  
“But then still, they don't get hurt. It's only really the people I work with that know about it. No one else gets involved ever.”  
Frank nodded. “That sounds good.”  
“No, it doesn't.”, Gerard said, smiling, but sadly so. “It sounds horrible.”  
“Better than what I was thinkin', though.”  
“What were you thinkin'?”  
“Eh.”, he said. “Let's not get into that. I was thinking pretty much anything you could come up with.”  
“Yeah.”, Gerard sighed. “You always jump to the worst shit when things are this abstract.” “-Not you, specifically, but, you know.”  
“Yeah.”, Frank nodded quickly. He looked down at their hands. Gerard wasn't shaking as much anymore.

“I think – you know, what really confuses me is Mikey? It just feels kinda weird, I've known him so long, like seven years, I thought about it earlier. And all this time he's just been the sweetest kid in the world. And now this?”  
Gerard nodded. “I get what you mean. Mikey plays a pretty small part.”  
“He helps me, mostly. He's kinda paranoid, and I mean, rightly so, uh, about someone finding out. Cause we'd get in trouble and the other person'd get in trouble and it would become this huge deal, so he keeps everything pretty tightly under wraps.”  
“It's not nothing, what we do. It isn't. And it's connected to other people, you know, that don't care as much as we do about no one getting hurt. So he's right.”  
This was getting serious again. Back into that territory that Frank had been so happy to leave behind for a couple hours, in which it was difficult to sleep or ever stop wondering. He felt like his brain was raw from it already and didn't think he could take another week of it.  
“Uh, so when I say that he can't know that you saw, I say that cause he'd worry himself sick about you. He already does, cause I started takin' you along to shit. He'd have my fucking head if you found out more through me. He told me he'll sever all ties between us and you immediately if I tell you literally anything.”  
“Oh...”  
Frank's stomach felt heavy.  
“Yeah. That's, uh, part of why he doesn't like us getting closer, I guess.”  
“Cause that's our terms for this. No one gets hurt. We're only doing this as long as we can uphold that.”  
“So… I'd get hurt if someone found out that I know?”, Frank clarified, scared to ask but sure he'd be even more scared if he wouldn't.  
Gerard sighed heavily. “Yeah.”  
“What, really? Are you serious?”  
His voice sounded sad. “I mean, there's a possibility of that happening. We'd obviously do our best to keep you safe. But we aren't exactly, uh, at the top of the food-chain, here. And there's just no need for things to get that bad.”  
“No.”, Frank agreed. “Oh, wait, so -”, he started, kind of breathless now. He sat up more straight. “It's not that bad right now?”  
Gerard looked over at him, apparently having caught on to how scared Frank really was. He pulled his hand into his lap. “No!”  
“No, right, it'd be bad if you found out more.”, he said quickly. “I don't know if Spencer saw you, I hope not, I'm not gonna lie to you and say there's no risk right now at all, cause Spencer's a big deal, but, like, you don't know anything. They don't have a real reason to go after you. All you know is that something's goin' on, you don't know what, you don't know who anybody is. All the other people standin' by that wall could'a seen us too.”  
“Yeah.”, Frank said, shaky. “Fuck, I – this is really scary.”  
Gerard pulled his other hand out from under the blanket-cape he'd made, so some air got in. He rubbed at one of his eyes. “I'm sorry, Frankie.”

“I … it's not your fault, I did this to myself.”  
He sighed. “Partly. But, I should'a never made you come along. Mikey told me. I just, I thought you'd think it'd be cool. And I didn't think you're nosy enough to do anything like that. Mikey told me, though, I should'a just listenend.”  
Frank inhaled, shaky. He felt like everything around him was spinning.  
“What's gonna happen if Spencer saw me, and you know, decides he needs to do something about it?”  
“Well, if he comes for you, you're gonna tell him exactly like it is, you don't know shit about him, you don't know who he is, you just wanted to see what I was up to. That was it, right?”  
“Yeah.”  
“He can tell when you tell him the truth.”, Gerard said, sounding sad and exhausted and heavy again. “You just gotta stick with your story. He won't, uh, he won't kill you-”, it was obvious that had been hard for Gerard to say. He'd been light on the word itself. “-or anything. He'll scare you so you'll stay away.”, he said, sounding sympathetic. “But there's no reason to do any more than that.”

Frank carefully pulled his hand away from Gerard's and buried his face in his palms. He leaned forward to dispel the anxiety tingling in his stomach, pressing his eyes shut. Gerard put a heavy, warm hand on his back.  
“But it's been a week.”, his voice was quiet. “I don't think it's likely that he's gonna do something after so much time passed, if he thought you were a threat he would'a acted immediately.”  
Frank nodded, clinging to every little bit of reassurance he could get his hands on.  
“You sure?”  
Gerard exhaled loudly. “I'm pretty sure, yeah.”  
“Can't you do something?”, Frank asked, and turned his face to Gerard's, who flinched visibly.  
“I'm tryin'.”, he said, quiet.  
“Have you talked to him?”  
“No, I haven't – Frank, I can't go into these details.”  
Frank nodded. “Yeah, yeah, sorry.”

“I'm so sorry. Mikey told me.”, Gerard repeated, full of regret. “Should'a listened. He's known you longer, I'm a fucking asshole for this.”  
“No, you're not. I did this to myself.”  
“You didn't know how serious this was.”  
“Yeah, I fucking did.”, said Frank. He pulled his hands from his face and straightened himself out. “I didn't think that much about Spencer, but I knew about Rob, and I'm fucking terrified of Rob, too.”  
“Oh, but I thought about that more. I think that Rob doesn't really mind that you saw the deal. Cause he knows that you know that something's going on. Maybe he thinks you were closer than you were, and you actually saw somethin', but again, if he asks you, just tell it like it is. Say you were far away, on the phone, and didn't see shit, alright? He'll scare you, but he won't hurt you. He wouldn't put a hand on you.”  
Frank exhaled.  
“I really do think you're outta the woods with this one. I can't promise, but, uh, if you want a guess.”  
“Okay.”, Frank said. “Thank you. It's nice of you to reassure me, when I acted like such a fucking creep.”, he rubbed at his face some more.  
“I guess I was jealous you went out there with that guy.”, he said, which was mostly a lie, but how else was he gonna make this go away? “And I kinda wanted to know how far you'd go with him, I don't know.”  
Gerard snorted softly. He retrieved his hand from Frank's back and instead used it to prop up his chin. “What?”, he started, quietly, unsure but sounding lighter. “'d you think I was gonna suck dick in the woods like some kinda horny teenager?”  
Frank laughed into his hands. It felt good, he could feel his own shoulders release. He was also embarrassed.  
“I don't know. Yeah.”, he said. He giggled at himself.  
“Fuck, what can I say. It calms my nerves.”  
“It does?”, Gerard was grinning.  
“Yeah, you should – oh.”  
Gerard laughed at him, hearing his tone shift to embarrassed.  
“Sorry.”, Frank said, rubbing at his eyes. “I'm sorry, God, I'm fucking useless.”  
“No, you're good.”  
“Besides, who said I haven't?”

Two seconds of lightheartedness. That was apparently all that Frank could catch. His breath stuck in his throat, and then he exhaled for a long, shaky two seconds. “Jesus, don't put that in my head.”, he groaned.  
Gerard laughed again. He sounded pretty fucking relaxed about all this, suddenly. Maybe it was the heaviness of the previous conversation contrasting this, or maybe he was just smug. Frank wasn't gonna look at his face to check right now. 

It wasn't like that had been all that he'd been able to think about the last week, anyway. Potentially being fucking killed or getting his tongue cut out by some angry mobster, or Gerard in the woods with some stranger, half in public, half hidden away, kneeling in the backseat of a car while getting throat-fucked by someone dangerous, his hair all over the place, eyes big. Fuck, it was embarrassing how many times he'd pictured it, and how much he'd thought about it. But what else was he supposed to do at night, when he wasn't able to sleep? He felt like Gerard knew, somehow. He had to.

Frank rubbed his face. “God, you need to get out of my house.”  
Gerard laughed at him again. “Yeah?”, his voice was somewhere between sympathy and teasing.  
Frank could feel his hand land on his back again, heavy and careless, this time. He patted at him.  
“'s alright.”  
When Frank peeked at him through his fingers, there was a huge smirk on Gerard's face. He looked away and down pretty quickly, his hair falling back into his face, but Frank could still see his teeth, and it still knocked the wind out of his lungs. 

Frank exhaled, deep. He leaned back and let the night air cool his face. This time, the silence felt comfortable. He was so relieved he felt like maybe he'd finally get some sleep tonight. He was fucking tired, too.  
“Thanks for talkin' this out with me.”, he said, and Gerard looked over at him.  
“It's just … what were you even gonna do?”  
“Ugh.”, Frank made, rearranging himself in his chair. “I hadn't thought that far ahead, I was pretty drunk.”  
“Huh.”  
“I won't do it again.”  
“Yeah, no, I do believe that.”, said Gerard, sarcastic, the now familiar heaviness tinting his voice. 

They quietly watched the city for a while.  
Frank hesitated for a moment, then lifted himself out of his chair to plant a kiss half in Gerard's hair, half on his cheek. He lingered for just a second too long for it to be casual. It just felt good, being close.  
Before he had time to get shy again, Frank stood up, grabbed his mug from the windowsill, and said “Come on!” to Gerard, who was gathering his blanket around himself and smiling behind his curtain of hair.  
“You can just put that on the bed.”, Frank said on his way to the kitchen, hoping to get a second of air before they'd say goodbye. He was dizzy. The world around him felt like it had tilted 80 degrees to the right and was made of molasses, like he was drunk. Gravity still didn't seem to exist, somehow.  
What Frank needed was to throw himself face-first onto his mattress and deal with his feelings, in the dark of his room and on his own.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one is very Mikey-centric and explores some background. It's pretty sad and dramatic which is why it took me so long to write. But there's some big brother -Gerard at the end to hopefully make up for it. The next one's gonna be more fun.

Mikey had a bunch of new shoes he was showing to Frank while their popcorn was in the microwave. He'd been on a glam kick lately, wearing leopard print pants, this new black felt coat that he cinched his skinny waist in with, hats, occasionally.  
The particular pair of shoes he was rambling about now were glossy red patent-leather ankle boots that Frank wanted to have too even though he would never in a million years be able to pull them off. Maybe he could put them on a shelf somewhere in his apartment. Make it seem like they were part of the 80s fashion exhibit they looked like they'd been stolen from. They worked on Mikey, though.  
As he was turning one of the shoes over in his hands, listening to Mikey, Frank was thinking how much he'd actually missed being here. And being alone with Mikey. Listening to him made him remember how much he actually loved him. 

Which made the realization that followed sting more than it probably would have, otherwise.

How had Frank accepted this entire time that Mikey could afford all the stuff he was constantly buying and this really decent two room apartment with a minimum wage job at a gas station?  
The gigantic collection of shoes and patterned pants, some of which he had people from other countries send to him because he was very into obscure indie brands and more CDs and vinyls than he could realistically ever listen to should have been a dead giveaway. It made no sense whatsoever.  
Maybe Frank was too trusting, or maybe the reason for that was that he'd known Mikey like this ever since, and as a kid he hadn't really thought about money, so he'd been too used to his lifestyle to ever question it. Either way, he felt stupid.

Mikey had kept so many secrets from him.  
Being Frank's closest friend, he knew almost everything about him, and Frank had just assumed that it was the same the other way around. He regretted how much he'd shared with him, how much he liked him and how openly he'd always shown it, regretted how trusting he'd been. Had this uncomfortable urge to somehow retroactively seal himself up, to hide, now, in order to shield himself from being jerked around.

Even the apartment itself with its walls covered in posters and floor to ceiling shelves felt like a stranger that knew more than him. It was a cold, lonely feeling. The idea of staying here for as long as it would take to watch three movies made him feel worse and worse. He kind of wanted to leave, and soon.  
Politeness and a bad conscience about how much he had neglected Mikey over the past few months, mixed with vague thoughts about how he was acting like a child because this was obviously so much bigger, more serious and burdened with more consequences than anything in Frank's life he'd shared with Mikey made him stay. In addition to all that, he didn't want to cause a scene he would have to deal with later. 

However, it was impossible to focus on the movie. It was a horror, and that was about the last thing Frank wanted to be watching.  
His mind wandered to the conversation he'd had with Gerard last night. It had been doing that pretty much all day, until his boss telling him off for how quiet and charmless he'd been had snapped him out of it. Brought him back to reality, where he was a grown man with bills to pay that had no business day dreaming about his crush and putting customers off because of it. 

Right now though, he'd rather do that than dwell on Mikey.

The entire Spencer-thing still didn't make sense to him, but now that Gerard had told him that it was unlikely that consequences of his snooping would follow over a week after it had happened, he finally felt like he could let that go.  
What he was thinking about was the hand-holding, how open Gerard's eyes had looked when he'd recognized in Frank's how much he liked him, how he'd been so willing to make him feel better and how all that meant that he could be sure now that Gerard liked him back. The thought hit him square in the chest, hard.  
Another one followed about how Gerard would probably let him kiss him, and touch him, and that lead down a train of thoughts involving half-public blowjobs, which he realized a little late was kind of fucked up to think about while he was sitting next to the dude's brother.  
Frank sighed and pressed his fingers into his eyes to set his head straight, feeling even more stupid than before with his dick getting hard. Something had to give, either he would have to leave or he'd have to talk to Mikey.

“What?”  
“Hm?”, Frank kept his eyes closed, not wanting to meet the stare he knew Mikey was giving him. He wasn't done deciding what to do yet.  
“You're acting really weird.”  
“I am?”  
“Yeah, you're all quiet. Do you not like the movie? We can watch one of the other ones if you want.”  
“No, no, sorry. It's alright.”  
Frank wondered if he should tell him his stomach hurt, since Mikey knew he had chronic issues with it, and ask him to reschedule.  
Mikey turned his face back toward the TV. He pulled his legs up to his chin but seemed uncomfortable nonetheless, like he couldn't find the right way to sit. Eventually, he tucked his legs under his butt, exhaling through his nose. A tell-tale sign that he was deep in thought.  
“I can drive you home if you want.”, he said, eventually, keeping his eyes straight on the TV.  
Mikey's voice sounded sad. Not overtly so but in a way where Frank could tell he was trying not to let it on and it seeped through anyway.  
He looked down into his lap. “No, dude.”, he said, thinking. “Look-”  
Keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, Mikey swallowed. He'd told Frank earlier that he'd already seen this movie. It wasn't that, it was that he didn't want to do this. Just like Frank didn't.  
“I feel fucking stupid.”, he said, finally. He didn't sound angry but he sounded hurt, betrayed, so much so that it surprised himself.  
Mikey sighed deeply.  
“I know.”, he said. the same sadness in his voice. This time it didn't sound like he was trying to cover it up. Just sounded heavy. “I'm sorry.”, he said and inhaled again, as if he was going to continue. Frank let him, waiting.  
“I know it's weird. But you don't wanna know what's going on, trust me.”  
“I don't. But I didn't even know that there was something to know, you know?”  
“You could have told me that at least.”  
“What? Like, listen, there's this big secret that I have that I can never tell you, ever, but I just want you to know that I'm hiding something, so be suspicious!”  
Mikey had waved his hands around in front of his chest and let himself fall into the couch. He looked at Frank with a pained expression on his face.  
Frank sighed. “Dude, anything. Seven years in? You could have said, 'Look, Gerard and me are involved in something pretty serious, I can't tell you what it is, but we're making money.' You could have kept it really vague. You could have just been like, 'We do this thing, it's really illegal and connected to a lot of dangerous people, so I can't tell you more about it, but that's why I'm kinda rich even though I only work at a gas station.'”  
“Dude, you would have never let it go.”, Mikey sounded strained, like he was apologizing for what he was saying but didn't know what else to do either. “You would have pestered me about it forever and either you would have found something out, or you would have hated me because I didn't tell you, or because I was hiding something.”  
“I'm really not that nosy.”  
“Yes you are!”  
“If you would have told me it's dangerous and I can't know cause some fucking mobsters might come after me, I would have left it alone.”  
“Dude, maybe that's true now? I'm not sure. But it hasn't been for long. Remember when you broke into your stepfather's apartment that one night cause you were convinced he was some kinda serial killer?”  
“That wasn't-”  
“Dude that was last year. And you were so sure that guy was dangerous. That was insane!”  
“No, it wasn't, I knew he was outta town with my mom! Nothing could have gone wrong, I planned it really well.”  
“One of his neighbors could have caught you, easily.”  
“No, cause that neighborhood is sketchy as fuck and people mind their business! Plus, I was in there really quick, it looked like I had a key.”  
“Are you sure? Did you know that he doesn't have friends close? Or someone watching his apartment for him when he's not there? Or maybe a fucking camera somewhere?”  
“Dude, I don't think-”, he didn't think that fucking Richard was involved in some gang, he just thought he was a shitty dude his mom shouldn't get close to. But he also remembered how much more dramatic he'd made the situation seem to justify his snooping to Mikey, and that, considering everything was going on here, it was a bad argument. “That just wasn't the vibe.”  
Mikey raised an eyebrow at him.  
“What?”  
“Dude, whatever, I don't wanna attack you.”, Mikey said, looking away. He pushed his glasses up by the bridge of them. “I'm just trying to explain my thought process. That wasn't the first time you did something like that either. Remember when you stole that kid Benjamin's notebook cause you wanted to know why he wasn't taking the bus with you anymore? I just – you're sorta unpredictable when it comes to this shit.”  
Frank cringed at the memory, but he couldn't really argue with what Mikey was saying.

And he also knew that he was right, he would have definitely tried to find out what he and Gerard were involved in.  
Maybe not right away, straight after he'd told him that something was going on, but at some point, maybe drunk, maybe angry, maybe bored, he would have come up with a plan.  
Frank rested his eyes on the TV screen. A handsome 80s man was screaming his head off at orange ooze coming out of the walls and the ceiling. Out of his periphery he saw that his phone was blinking green. He had a text. Like a wave, his anticipation about Gerard came back over him. He closed his eyes and let his head fall against the wall. “Fuck.”  
“I just didn't wanna get in trouble, man.”  
“I know.”, said Frank, his hands covering his face.  
“And, you know, I did agree to let G take you along to some stuff. Cause he said he thought you would keep out of it cause you were so scared of Rob after that one night we went to see the Gold in Bloom's.”  
“Yeah.”, said Frank. He hadn't been aware that his fear of Rob was so obvious. That was a little embarrassing.  
“Yeah, I guess you knew I was gonna get wind of something.”  
“Yeah. So it's kinda like I told you, right?”  
Frank sighed. He opened his eyes slowly, nodding. The ceiling and the walls he was seeing didn't seem so foreign now. “I guess.”

They were quiet for a moment. Frank already began to feel relieved when Mikey started asking him something, carefully. “When you went out with G and that other dude to smoke, did you think it might be Spencer?”  
Frank felt caught. Again. He tried to breathe as normal and let his head roll to the side to look Mikey in the eyes. “No. I thought that it couldn't be, because at that point, we'd already been at the party for hours and I assumed you already talked to him.”  
Mikey nodded. “So, you really went out after them because you wanted to smoke?”  
“Yeah. I dunno. And I was kinda jealous. I thought maybe he was gonna hook up with that dude, or something. I was pretty drunk. It was stupid.”  
Mikey nodded. “Okay.”  
He had his arms crossed and his head tilted to the side. There was no way he believed him, Frank thought. He could see him biting his lower lip. 

“I really wanted to tell you.”, Mikey said. When he heard how weak his own voice sounded, he looked down at his lap. Frank stared. Surprised, kind of shocked by how miserable he sounded and waiting for Mikey to elaborate.  
“Cause I hate it.”, Mikey immediately started tearing up. “Cause it's fucked up. I have these nightmares and I'm terrified all the time cause of who we work with.”  
He sounded hesitant, but like he needed to talk about it. “Okay.”, Frank said, encouraging him to continue. He put a hand on Mikey's arm.  
“I can't talk to anyone other than Gerard about it, but he's so weird when it comes to this. Like, he's been so depressed so long, he doesn't realize how bad this all is. Like, he doesn't like it, he knows it's wrong, but I don't think he really, like, understands how bad it is, and how bad it is for him, and that it's making him worse and all that, it's like his brain just stops working when you try to talk to him about it.”  
“And he feels so fucking guilty, I think – and all the other people that I'm around that know, like Rob, who's the only other person I ever talk to about anything, by the way, they're so like desensitized to everything, they don't think it's a big deal.”, he said.  
“One time, I tried to talk to this one guy about something, cause we were at this place, and he seemed like he was having a hard time, too, and the next day I came home and all my windows were broken.”  
“What?”  
“Yeah. They wanna remind you there's protocol for people that act out. It's fucking terrifying.”  
Frank felt like all the wind had been knocked out of his lungs. His mind was completely blank. “That's insane, dude. That's so scary.”  
“Yeah. Either you shut up or you fuck off and never look back, never even think about what you did again.”  
Frank didn't want to interrupt to ask why he wouldn't just do that. He was sure Mikey had a good reason. But it seemed like he wasn't done talking yet, just gathering his thoughts. “Like I shouldn't even be telling you this much, but – nobody's here, so I guess it's fine, just don't tell anyone.”  
“No, dude, I won't. I promise.”  
Mikey nodded. “Like – I've been wanting to tell you for so long, cause I knew you'd get it. I knew if I sat you down and explained it all to you, beginning to end, you'd get it. I feel so sick every night I can barely sleep, man. And now when I think about that Gerard might be taking tha-”

In the other room, Mikey's phone had started to ring. It had stopped him dead in his tracks, eyes still big, cheeks bright red and wet with the tears he hadn't been able to hold back, hands still hanging in the air from gesturing. Wordlessly, he stood up onto shaky legs to take the call, wiping at his face with his sleeves as he walked.

When all Frank heard was a deep sigh, and a “Yeah, sure.”, coming from his friend, he was relieved. Somehow, for some reason, he'd thought maybe they, whoever they were, knew that Mikey was talking to him. He heard a dull thud and Mikey blowing his nose.  
Frank's head was full of white noise. Something in him, dull and quiet, was telling him he needed to get out of here, away from these people and all their misery and away from danger, but that impulse was nothing compared to the shock he felt at how upset Mikey was. The sadness and fear on his face and in his voice made Frank's stomach feel like it was trying to turn itself inside out. He wanted to help, at the same time, he was terrified to even think about how to do that. 

“G's comin, I guess.”, said Mikey from the doorway, shuffling his way back over to the couch. “He's sayin' something went wrong at the Muerte.”  
For once, Frank didn't care. “Ah.” He didn't want Gerard here, right now, he wanted Mikey to tell him more, to maybe figure this out.  
“Dude, why don't you leave?”  
Mikey sighed deeply.  
Frank watched Mikey's long, skinny legs navigate the mess they'd made.

When he let himself fall back onto the couch, closer to Frank this time, Frank put his hand back on his back, trying to be supportive. Mikey hid his face in his hands. He sighed again.  
“Cause Gerard would never come.”, he said. “He thinks this is the only thing he can do cause he's so scared of people he's convinced he couldn't do a normal job. He won't even try, he got so, so fucking scared, man. Every time I brought it up. I tried to convince him for a while, but it's like he can't even think about it without freaking out. And I'm not leavin' my brother.”, Mikey had mumbled the last couple words so much that Frank almost hadn't understood them and then his voice broke on the last one. Frank could feel his heart and stomach contracting painfully. He squeezed Mikey's shoulder, pulled him in towards himself. This whole thing sounded like a nightmare.  
“I get that.”, he said after a moment, slowly rubbing Mikey's back. “Of course not.”

“I used to get so mad at him. Cause Gerard started all this, he got involved with these people and then he wanted to show me, cause he was a dumb fucking edgy kid that watched too many horror movies, and when I showed up, they showed me some shit and said either I help, or I gotta get outta town. And I was a kid, man. We still lived with our mom back then.”  
Frank tried to swallow his nausea. “I'm sorry.”  
“Yeah. And, but, he won't even try, you know? I used to hate him so much for it. I dunno what happened, I guess I kinda just resigned. But sometimes I remember how bad it is, and I get the worst fucking panic attacks. I just wanna run away but I can't leave Gerard. Like, I can't. I tried a bunch of times. But it's like physically impossible. I just love him so much.”  
Frank nodded. “I know you do, man. It's hard.”  
He tried to argue, started to say something a couple times, but there really wasn't much to actually argue about. He understood both of them. “I'm sorry, Mikey. Has Gerard ever tried, like, a therapist?”  
Mikey's hands slid into his hair. His entire face was wet. “Yeah. Bunch of times. He says it just makes it worse.”  
“Hm.”  
“Do you want me to talk to him?”  
“No.” Mikey's eyes were big when he turned his head to look at Frank. “You can't. You can't tell him I even told you any of this.” He looked crazy with his hands in his hair and his face blotchy and wet.  
Frank nodded. “No, okay, I won't. Promise.”  
“He didn't mean to do this, you know.”  
“No, of course.”  
“No. He was just fucking stupid. I know he feels really guilty about it, but to him, it's like he's trapped now. He's a good guy. He's just doin' really bad.”  
Frank nodded. “No, dude, I know that. I know he's a good guy, and I know you love your brother. Shit like this is never black and white.”, said Frank. He'd sat through a bunch of documentaries about cults and gangs, so he knew that much, but he didn't have anything else to offer.  
Mikey nodded. “No, it's not.”

He let himself fall to the side, so that his torso rested on Frank's lap. After a moment of settling in, Frank put an arm around him that Mikey cradled to his chest. The bones in his shoulders were digging into his legs almost painfully.  
They were quiet for a while. Frank could tell Mikey was still crying, but it was ebbing off. When he looked down at his face, he saw that his eyes were open and empty, staring into nothing.

“I miss Gerard.”, Mikey said and pulled Frank's arm closer to his chest.  
“I'm sure he'll be here soon. Did he say what went wrong?”  
“No.”, Mikey said. “He sounded kinda frazzled.”  
Mikey wiped a hand over his face because his bangs were falling into his eyes. Some of his hair was sticking to his wet face. It was a little wavy naturally. Frank saw it that way so rarely that it felt odd every time he did.  
“He said something happened and Yana said to stop and go home to be safe. But I guess he doesn't feel good, so he wants to hang out.”  
“Hm. Weird.”  
Mikey yawned as he nodded.  
“How old was Gerard, you know, when he got you involved with all that?”  
“I think like sixteen.”  
“Mh.”  
“He was a dumb kid.”  
“You were what, like fourteen?”  
“Yeah, I guess.”  
“God, that's young.”  
“I know...don't be mad at him, man. I was his only friend. He didn't have anybody else to tell. He didn't realize how serious it was. We both thought it was really cool at first.”  
“Uh-huh?”  
“They weren't stupid, you know. Got us to do small things at first, mostly watch what they were doin'. We kinda saw how much power they had. Which we both thought was dope at first, until we realized that meant we had to do what they told us, you know, whatever it was.”  
“Yeah.”  
“It just kept getting worse. We were in there so deep before we even knew it.”  
“God that sounds so fucking horrible.”  
“It is.”, Mikey said. “I guess it's good we had each other. We used to talk stuff out, in the beginning, you know.”  
Frank nodded again. “Yeah. That's good. Kept you grounded, I bet.” His voice sounded quiet. Everything around him felt oddly far away, unreal.  
“Yeah. I think it just kinda got really bad at some point and he just stopped, like, almost being able to process it. Like he just did what he had to do and went completely silent.”  
“Yeah. I guess that happens.”  
“Like he's really traumatized?”  
“Yeah.”, said Mikey. “He always did the big stuff for both of us. Didn't let me get into contact with the really bad stuff too much.”  
“Oh. So he's trying to protect you.”  
“Yeah. Always. He feels really, really bad about getting me involved.”  
“And uh, I'm glad you guys are, you know. Cause I know you're good for him, and I'm glad he has you. I think you're helping. Kinda bringing some normality to his life or whatever.”  
“Yeah. That'd be nice. I hope so.”  
“Yeah. But I dunno. I didn't want you involved in this. 's like he's taking you away from me. And it kinda feels like he's ruining the last normal part of my life.”

Frank's heart hurt so much it was almost hard to breathe. Slowly shutting his eyes, he leaned back against the wall. “I need to get better about that.”  
“Like, seein' you by yourself, not just with G. Make time for you. I'm sorry, I just got so caught up in everything. I didn't know, like. I would have never thought you're this miserable.”, he said. “I didn't know it was hurting your feelings like that.”  
“No, 's not your fault. I didn't tell you. But it'd be nice, yeah. If you could be around more.”

Frank was exhausted. With his eyes closed and his head resting against the wall, he realized just how exhausted. The room felt like it was spinning. Mikey was heavy and warm in his arms. None of this felt real. Frank felt impacted by it, obviously, but it also felt so far away.

Mikey started to move, so Frank loosened his hold on him, thinking he was getting up. Instead, he turned onto his back. Clearly relieved that he'd gotten all that off his chest, and more tired than Frank had ever seen him, he almost looked content now.  
Frank didn't manage to chase the hollow expression off his face, so Mikey's small smile faltered.  
“You're freaked out.”  
“Yeah.”, Frank said, exhaling deeply. “This is all so fucking horrible.”, he said, rubbing his face with a hand that felt numb and like it didn't belong to him. “I feel so fucking bad for you. Like, I'm so sorry. I didn't know this was going on at all. You were so young – I wish I could do something.”  
“No, dude, don't do that. I already feel better talkin' about it.”  
Frank nodded. “Good, okay. You can always do that. You know, feel free to keep it vague, but if you need to talk, I'm here.”  
“Thanks, Frankie.”, Mikey smiled, and Frank thought he saw his eyes glisten. He had to be doing pretty bad if he was that unstable.

Frank wondered when Gerard was coming, how long it'd been since he'd called. Was grateful that he would be here, because this was so much and having him around always felt like everything was gonna be okay. At the same time, and it felt like mentally jumping down a cliff to think about because it was such a large discrepancy, there was all this misery now, too, that he was aware of. He'd known Gerard was ill, but not how dark everything was. He thought he had some untreated social anxiety that he'd get a grip on eventually. Frank couldn't stop feeling dizzy and sick.  
“Let's go out and have a cigarette.”, Mikey said. Frank only now realized he'd put his hand on the arm that Frank was holding his face with.  
“Yeah.”, Frank said, looking down into his eyes. “'s a good idea.”

Usually, they both complained about having to walk down four flights of stairs to go outside to smoke. Mikey didn't want his entire apartment to stink, so he didn't let anybody smoke inside and he himself only smoked when he had company.  
Tonight it felt good. To get out of the apartment and into the street. Frank felt a little better out there already, like reality was slowly coming back to him.

Neither of them noticed it right away, but when Frank was calming down, trying to take deep breaths, focus on the cold air, the smoke burning in his lungs, the wind and the gentle noises it made combing through the leaves of the trees here around the parking lot, he realized that Mikey kept looking at something over his right shoulder. 

Frank turned around to follow his line of sight, heart nearly standing still. He was terrified that it might be someone from Mikey's gang and was already thinking where the hell to run or hide, when he saw that it was Gerard's car.  
“Oh – dude, is he just parked there?”, he asked, catching his breath.  
“Looks like it.”, Mikey said. “I keep waiting for him to come out, but he won't.”  
“Man I was wondering what was taking him so long. Come on.”, Frank said, who really needed to walk off his adrenaline. Mikey didn't follow him right away.  
“Wait. Can you still see that I was crying?”  
Frank looked at him. It was dark out here, so he switched his cigarette into his other hand and reached up to turn Mikey's chin carefully toward one of the street lights they stood by. Mikey let him, watching his face. “Yeah.”, Frank said plainly and shrugged, switching his cigarette back.  
“Tell him we had a fight but we made up if he asks.”  
“Okay.”  
“Please don't tell him about the other shit.”  
“Mikey, I won't. I promise. Come on.”

Frank was first at the car. He wasn't sure what exactly was propelling him, relief, adrenaline, worry. But he only briefly felt better.  
Gerard was hunched over his steering wheel, hugging it, his forehead resting on his wrist.  
Frank felt his heart sink again and knocked the knuckles of two fingers into his window, which made the other stir. He did it again, until Gerard seemed to pull himself out of whatever contemplation or sleep he was in. When he saw that someone was standing right in front of his car, he jumped so badly that Frank jumped, too. His eyes were wide. He looked terrified. Mikey took a step forward and reached his arm past Frank to try and open the car door, which was locked from the inside, but still opened a second or two later. Gerard had apparently realized who they were.

“What the fuck happened to you?”, Gerard asked, breathless, hoarse and half muffled by his opening door. He stared at Mikey's face and then his eyes briefly slid over to Frank.  
“'s nothin'.”, Mikey said. “Kinda got into a fight. All good now, though.”  
The last sentence mostly got lost in Gerard's shoulder.  
Looking completely appalled, he'd put a hand on the frame of his car to pull himself up and climbed out, awkward and stiff. Before even finding his footing, he pulled Mikey into a hug so tight and careless, Frank instinctively took a step to the side. By the way Mikey's jacket was bunching, he could guess the strength of his grip. The look in Gerard's eyes almost made him stumble backwards. Frank didn't know how to describe it other than as threatening.  
“You made up, yeah?”, he asked, and Frank nodded, genuinely bewildered. It was like everything that had happened between them didn't even count. All Gerard was seeing was his little brother looking like he'd been crying his eyes out for an hour and Frank, who didn't look good, but not like he'd done any crying at all.  
“Yeah. 'was me, dude, not Frankie. It's okay.”, Mikey said and while something around Gerard's eyes relaxed, he continued to look somewhat suspicious.  
“Kinda both of us.”, Frank said, quietly. “But we cleared everything up.”  
“Mikey and me just need to spend more time together, like, on our own.”, Frank explained, and finally, Gerard's features relaxed.  
“Oh.”, Gerard said. “Yeah, of course, we talked about that too. You sure you're good, Mikey?”  
“Yeah.”

Gerard looked like he was ready to let go of his brother, but Mikey pulled him closer.  
Frank heard him mumble “Love you” into his brothers shoulder. Gerard's brow creased.  
“I love you too, Mikeyway.”  
Gerard started to sway him a little from side to side. He closed his eyes after a moment, which were all Frank could see of him since Mikey was a good bit taller.  
After a long moment of thinking he looked at Frank again, like he was considering something.  
“'d you tell him?”, he asked, gentle and quiet.  
“No.”, Mikey said, and Frank looked away instinctively, immediately. Out of his periphery, he could see by his shaking back that Mikey had started to cry again.  
Gerard considered it. “Just part of it, then?”  
Mikey nodded. “Yeah. I'm sorry.”  
“No details.”, Frank said, trying to be helpful, but felt awfully stupid for it right away. Gerard looked at him for a moment.  
“You tell him how bad you're doin'?”, asked Gerard, sounding raspy and heavy and sad after it clicked. Kind of like he had on the balcony, but less like a dude that knew his way around what he was doing, showing sympathy and regret for having potentially gotten someone he cared about into danger and more like a kid struggling to keep his head over water and to stop from crying.  
Mikey nodded.  
“It's okay, Mikey, I get it.”  
Mikey whispered something that Frank couldn't understand.  
“No.”, Gerard said. “I'm not mad at you at all. Everything's fine.”  
Frank could see Gerard's eyes glisten wetly and looked away again, like he had earlier, like he'd been struck. Gerard had never cried in front of him. 

This whole situation was so painfully intimate, he realized how out of place he was, suddenly. Felt like he shouldn't be seeing this, like it was wrong to even look, but at the same time he wanted to, because of how sweet it was. How they acted and how much they loved each other always made something in his chest ache, but he wanted more of it, too. He didn't have a very good relationship with his own siblings.  
“I'll give you guys a minute.”

There were concrete stairs in front of Mikey's apartment building that Frank sat down on. It felt good, to get his head clear for a minute or two, but he couldn't help glancing at the others now and then.  
Despite the obvious horror they were in, they loved each other more than Frank had ever loved anyone or had ever been loved by anybody else. It had taken him about half a cigarette to come to that realization, but he was so struck by it, it made him feel completely alone.  
Suddenly it was just him, outside in the middle of the night, in the cold, with two people in the distance that he seemed to know very little about. Two people that prioritized the other over most if not all things in their lives. He wanted to go home, but then again, at home he was alone too.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This took a while because I was really busy - it has ghosts, spiders and maybe a smooch.

“It started smelling like – where Mikey and me used to live, there used to be this crematorium near by. When they burned the bodies, it smelled like -”, Gerard looked at Mikey, squinting slightly, trying to recall the exact scent he smelled years ago.   
Mikey cast his tired, heavy gaze onto the table between them.   
“It smelled like burning, obviously. But wrong. You could tell it wasn't just somebody having a barbecue or whatever. There was an edge to it. It was like, acidic. Would wake us up sometimes.”  
“Crematoriums aren't supposed to smell like anything, obviously, but that one had real old machinery and it broke every now and again. The owners didn't have money to replace it, so eventually it got shut down, cause it would be everywhere in the neighborhood and people lost their minds and complained. Obviously”  
“Uhuh.”, made Frank, taking a sip of tea Mikey had made when they'd gotten upstairs.  
“That was the first thing I noticed. Not constantly, it went away and came back like it was being wafted through the windows. Just that it was closer. It smelled so - immediate? Established? You know, like it was right under my nose. And then it would just be gone completely. Come back a while later. I feel like it's still in my nose now, fucking gross. I told the others and neither of them smelled it, so we took notice of that but we kept going for a while because it didn't feel super threatening.”  
“You know, the Muerte's near the woods, so of course you hear some woods-noises. But there was this tapping and scratching that came next. The others heard that too. It didn't sound like an animal scratching at the earth or the walls or something tryin' to dig for something or to get out of one of the rooms or something. And it wasn't some branch scratchin' the outside of the house, either.”, Gerard dragged his finger across the table in front of him a few times, remembering. “It was too rhythmic and slow for any of that. Was obvious that it had a conscience behind it.”  
Frank shuddered.  
“When we started talking about it, it stopped, but it came back a bunch of times, like the smell. We heard some knocking too.”  
“Oh man.”  
“Yeah. Tracy said we should leave at that point. So we went to go to the car. You're not supposed to run and be panicked, so we walked normally. Which is also why we left kinda early. Maybe we could have stayed, but it felt like it was already escalating, so we didn't want to risk anything. You never wanna run and freak out. That's chaos, that's what they want.”  
“So we got out okay, but then we didn't find the car. And we didn't park it in a different spot than we thought. When you're in that kinda area, you don't forget where you park. We found it an hour later. In the fucking woods.”  
Frank felt chills chase over his entire body. “What?”  
“Yeah. The whole fucking car was gone.”  
“That's insane.”  
“That's some Blair Witch shit.”, said Mikey, if quiet and kind of flat, you could hear this was affecting him as well.  
“Yeah! I said that too.”, Gerard took a deep breath. “Tracy and Yana prayed, and we found it. The thing is, that car is protected and sealed and everything, like, nothing can get inside of that. It can still move it, tough. From the outside. Apparently. So it was probably mad it couldn't get in. Same with us – we were well protected. We didn't show fear. I dunno. I think those things can smell it, or something. Feel it. But we didn't run, we didn't scream, that makes them mad. So it was mad cause it didn't get what it wanted. So it took the car.”  
“Imagine that. You're in the woods and some fucking car just floats by.”, said Mikey, and Frank laughed, weak. “Yeah, holy shit.”  
“It was probably not floating.”, Gerard said with a soft shrug. “From the outside it probably looked like it was being driven.”  
“Huh.”  
“Yeah.”, said Gerard. He stared off into the distance for a moment, seemingly thinking things through.  
“You know, Yana always describes the mood in those places, when they're dangerous, as a kind of darkness where it's not just the absence of light, but a very like, immediate presence of darkness. She says it's really solid. Like it has a lot of mass. Really heavy. I think that's what describes it best. We didn't see anything. But we all felt it.”  
“Holy shit, man.”  
“Yeah. It's kinda cool to like, experience, I think. Like we're all pretty rattled right now, but it's still intense and that's cool, you know, that's what you want. It's very real.”  
“Yeah, I get that.”  
Gerard nodded. “But yeah, it's still – none of us feel really good. I mean, I left Yana and Tracy alone cause I felt like they needed some space for themselves, you know, to take care of each other.”  
“Yeah.”  
“But I didn't wanna be alone, either, so. Sorry if I ruined your guyses night. I won't do it again.”  
“You didn't, dude.”, said Frank, and patted Gerard on the shoulder that was closest to him. His leather jacket still felt cool to the touch.  
“I promise I'll give you guys some space in the future. I just didn't wanna be alone tonight. I felt bad the second I asked you if I could come over, so I kinda stayed downstairs in the car for a while.”  
Mikey nodded. “Yeah. 's kinda an emergency, though, so. 's fine.”  
“Thanks, Mikey.”

Frank felt like everything up until the point where Gerard had said the car had been moved was pretty believable. He wasn't so sure if he believed that some kind of demon had done that. Maybe someone had wanted to steal it and for whatever reason changed their mind last minute and left it in the woods. Or-  
“Maybe someone like, saw you guys go into the hotel and wanted to fuck with you?”  
“By moving the car?”, Gerard asked.   
When Frank nodded, he shrugged. “Yeah, could be, absolutely. I didn't find any traces of someone having messed with it, but I didn't look either, so.”  
“Yeah. We could look tomorrow.”  
“We should.”  
“So are you guys stayin' overnight?”, Mikey asked, already peeling himself off his chair.  
“Oh–“, Gerard made big eyes at him. “Yeah, if you don't mind? I'm pretty tired. I dunno if I should be drivin' either of us home.”, he said, half directed at Frank, who nodded.  
“Sure, dude. You can have the couch. You know how it works, right? I need to go to bed.”   
“Yeah, ' corse.”

Frank went over to Mikey's bedroom to make himself useful while Gerard arranged the pull out couch bed. He insisted it was a one person job and they'd just get in each others way doing it together – when Frank stayed over, he usually slept on the couch as it was, or in Mikey's bed, so he didn't know how it worked either way.   
So he went looking for bedclothes. Because Mikey kept his in two plastic boxes on top of his closet, Frank had to get a chair to step on top of to be able to reach them. Not even Mikey could reach the boxes just standing, and he was the tallest out of all of them. Frank trapped one of the boxes between his stomach and the closet door in order to look for something that wasn't ugly or overtly sexy. Not that it mattered for one night, but it also didn't not matter.  
When Gerard came into the room, he rushed over to him to put a hand on the back of his thigh, eyes on what his hands were doing. “Green and gray stripes or orange flowers?”  
“Orange flowers, obviously.”, Gerard said. He was beaming. He looked cute from above, Frank thought, as he let the pillowcase drop down onto his face. “Good choice.”   
“Aw, fuck you.”, Gerard giggled and nodded it off, catching it with the hand that had previously held onto his thigh.

As they were making their bed, they were mostly quiet. Both had a lot to think about. Mikey was still running the shower.

“He was doin' really bad, huh?”, Gerard asked, addressing the elephant in the room as he was closing the buttons on his pillowcase.  
“Yeah.”, said Frank. “He cried a lot.”   
Gerard waited for him to continue.  
“I think it's good. He needed to get it out of his system. But he like – he's not okay. Really.”  
Frank briefly cast a look at him.   
Gerard nodded, looking sad. He was keeping his eyes on the pillow in his hands.   
“Yeah.”   
They were quiet again, the mood heavy now.

“It's good he's talkin' to you.”, said Gerard after a while. “It's just gonna stay between us three. He didn't tell you anything specific?”, he looked up without moving his head.   
“No dude, nothing. Just how he was feeling.”  
“Okay, good.”, Gerard nodded. 

“'m glad you're here, man.”, Frank said, throwing his pillow onto the couch that already had one of their blankets on it.   
“Yeah?”, Gerard seemed to forget the heaviness for a second, looking up at Frank, relieved.   
“Yeah, dude.”  
“'s nice… you don't think Mikey's mad?”  
Frank thought about that. “I don't know? He said earlier he missed you. But – I dunno. I think for tonight, like, specifically, it's good you're here. For him too.”  
Gerard nodded. “Good, okay.”  
“You're like stabilizing the situation a little I think.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Uh-huh.”   
Frank smiled at him, thinking. “You always kinda do, you know. 's always good havin' you around.”  
“Thanks, dude.”, Gerard said, looking back at his pillow. 

Settled in their makeshift bed, already having said goodnight to Mikey, who had looked a little better after his shower but still absolutely exhausted, and too lazy to get ready for bed themselves, they were zapping through the channels. Frank had cuddled up to Gerard right away, not wasting any time on awkwardness. He was holding one of Gerard's arms in both of his, head leaning against the upper part, his face half pressed into it. His sweater smelled faintly of incense.   
“I bet you're peeved cause you had to leave early, right? Like, don't Tracy and Yana live super far away?”  
“Yeah, they do. Louisiana.”, Gerard said. “It sucks, you know. It was still cool. But it is kinda disappointing. It's always nicer if you find something a little more willing to communicate peacefully. Always wish we had some kinda proof with these aggressive things, too. You kinda don't take a lot away from the whole thing when it's like this other than, like, being really scared.”  
“Yeah… you didn't film anything?”  
“No.”, Gerard smiled. “Technical devices can fuck with the vibes. We don't even use flashlights, man.”  
“Oh, God.”, Frank shivered a little at the thought. “So you're in the dark with no phones and no lights other than like, what, candles?”  
“Yeah, dude.”, Gerard smiled, delighted.  
“I could never.”  
“Ah, no need to. It's dope, but it can scare you real bad too. Some people I know got really fucked up from it. Sometimes you get spirit attachments. It's kinda messy. Smart to keep out of it. Specially if you're scared. Tracy's right about that.”  
“Huh. But don't you – oh, uh, dude?” Frank pointed at something floating next to Gerard, falling, but kind of slowly. A large black ball – Oh. Gerard followed Frank's finger and they both realized what it was at the same time.   
“Oh fuck.” Gerard scrambled to get to his knees, Frank abruptly let go of his arm while Gerard slapped at the spider that was rappelling down his fringe. He yelped as the single string of web stuck to his hand and punched it down into the blanket he'd previously covered his legs with. The spider unfolded its legs rapidly and started running toward Frank, who jerked himself away from it, pressing into the backrest of the couch, hiding behind Gerard. Gerard was slapping at the thing with his bare hands, and Frank finally grabbed one of the firmer couch pillows they had been leaning on, but before he could get to his knees to squish the spider with it, Gerard's erratic blanket-slapping ceased. He whimpered in his throat, visibly shuddering. “Do you have it?”, Frank asked, almost scared to hear the answer.   
“Yeah.”, made Gerard, miserable. “It's still moving.”  
A violent shiver went through Frank. “Ah, fuck.”  
He slapped his hand on top of Gerard's, who startled but didn't make a noise.   
“Sorry – did it stop?”  
“I don't think so.”  
“Let go really quick, I'll kill it.”  
Gerard gazed over at Frank, who was kneeling there with a pillow in his hands, looking out for blood. He erupted into stress-giggles. “Fuck.”  
“What?”, Frank joined him. “I've done that before!”  
“Not on a soft surface!”  
“I don't know, what do you want me to do?”  
“I don't know!”, Gerard stopped giggling and shuddered, squeezing his eyes shut. Frank thought he'd seen his eyes start to swim. “I fucking hate this, do something, I can feel its fucking legs moving -”  
“Ugh, dude, stop.”, Frank grimaced, a hand moving to Gerard's back for comfort. “I'll get a book.”  
“Uh-huh.”, he nodded rapidly. “Hurry!”  
Frank did so, climbing out of the blanket that was still tangled around his legs, he was struggling to get to his feet as fast as he wanted.  
“It's probably stuck to my fucking hand.”  
“Shut up! Fuck!”  
“But if I lift my hand and it's stuck, what are we gonna do? If you drop a book on it, you're gonna break my fucking wrist.”  
“I'll – fuck, I'm getting two.”, Frank said, pulling the biggest book he saw out of the book case across the room. “We'll scrape it off with the edge of one book, and I'll kill it with the other one.”  
“Okay.”, Gerard's voice sounded pressed. 

Their impromptu plan worked out okay. Frank got in behind Gerard again, so that Gerard would only have to lift his hand from the wrist up, not giving the spider much room to escape. Frank dragged the thinner book – he'd quickly found a hard cover that was suitable, it looked like a children's book, Frank felt horrible for Mikey and vowed to clean it immediately after they were done with it – along Gerard's palm until the spider was trapped between it and the blanket instead of Gerard's hand and the blanket. Once Gerard had pulled his whole hand away and quickly toward himself, he dropped the bigger book on top. It made a loud, dull thud. Gerard was rubbing his hand along his jeans.   
“Did you get it?”, he asked, slightly shrill.  
“Yeah. I think it was dead.”, Frank said. “It definitely didn't get out. It's under there.”  
“Okay.”, Gerard nodded, and they looked at each other, both with huge, shocked eyes.  
“That was fucking huge!”  
“I know!”, Gerard looked on the verge of tears. Frank didn't know he was that scared of spiders. Obviously he didn't like them, but he didn't know it was that bad. Maybe he'd just had a long night, he thought. “I don't wanna look at my hand.”  
Frank nodded. “No, okay, keep it there, I'll get some kitchen roll and – you know.”  
“Thanks.”

There wasn't anything left on Gerard's palm to clean off, it was all on his jeans. Frank wiped at them, but didn't get much of a result. “I think it's all on the book.”, he said, actually thinking that Gerard had probably rubbed whatever remains had been on his hand into the fabric. You couldn't see anything, luckily.  
“You go wash your hands, I'll deal with this.”, he said, bunching up the paper roll and gesturing to the pile of books.  
“Thanks, Frankie.”  
Gerard sounded and looked deeply grateful. Frank shrugged. He didn't know what had gotten into him. He was terrified of spiders himself. This was, objectively, vile. And yet Gerard's comfort took absolute priority. He made a dismissive noise. “Of course, dude.”

Luckily, the arachnid leftovers were pretty much smushed into an unrecognizable fleck. You could see the legs, but Frank refused to look closely enough to understand the ways in which they were broken and tangled, he made his eyes glaze over and just dealt with it, until there was only a small brown spot left on the blanket. He got the books clean with just kitchen roll, so he put those to the side and then stripped their blanket of its cover. He'd rather sleep with it bare than to potentially have spider juices disturb his sleep.

Gerard came back carrying his jeans, doing what could only be described as sulking. “That was fucking horrible. This whole day is awful.”  
“We can go to sleep.”, Frank said, trying not to stare at Gerard's legs poking out of his boxers and the hem of his hoodie.   
“If we go to sleep now, I'm gonna have nightmares.”  
“Spider nightmares?”  
“Spider nightmares.”  
Frank sighed and folded the blanket-cover until it was compact enough to toss far away.   
“It came out of my hair, right?”  
“Yeah, I think so.”  
“If I take a shower, what if more come out and attack me while I'm naked?”  
Frank laughed a little and rubbed his face. “That would be fucking evil.”  
“Yeah. I'll slip and break my neck.”  
“Ugh.”, Frank made a face, trying not to laugh. “Lemme see.”, he said, gesturing Gerard to sit back down with him. 

He kind of felt ridiculous searching Gerard's hair for insects.   
“I feel like a fucking monkey.”  
Gerard giggled. “I know. I didn't wanna say it.”  
“There's nothing here though.”  
“Okay. Thanks, Frankie.”  
Frank pushed himself up on his knees a little to be able to see into the hood of Gerard's hoodie. “Nothing in your clothes, either.”  
“Okay.”  
“You got a hair tie?”  
Frank was holding all of Gerard's hair in his left hand. He didn't want to miss the opportunity to see him in a ponytail again. “You know. It'll probably just spook you to get hair in your face now.”  
“Oh, that's true. I think so -”, Gerard's hand flew to where the pocket would be in his jeans, landing on his naked thigh. “Oh.”  
“I'll get it.”

He did indeed have one. Frank felt himself blush while he sat down opposite Gerard this time, instead of behind him. He felt like a kid. Both because he was doing Gerard's hair for no reason, and because he was getting nervous again, because they were alone, because they still hadn't even kissed, because Gerard was in his underwear, because he looked fucking adorable. Frank was combing Gerard's hair with his fingers for longer than would have been necessary to gather any stray strands, because Gerard was looking more and more hazy and relaxed. His eyes fell shut briefly but for too long for it to be passed off as a blink, while Frank dragged his hand up his neck. Frank was dizzy. “Please let me kiss you.”, he said, quiet and flat before he could psych himself out too much. “Yeah.”, came the hoarse reply.   
Frank left his hand where it was on Gerard's neck. His lips were warm and pliant, Gerard was shaking a little, Frank felt it against the fingers on his neck. Nevertheless, he lifted a hand to his side. Frank was careful moving his lips, trying to be the gentleman he knew was hidden somewhere in him. Gerard seemed to relax after a moment and became more active, but the kiss stayed gentle and shy.

 

Frank had slept well cuddled up to Gerard. He had a hard time forcing himself to wake up when Gerard was starting to move, obviously trying to detangle himself so he could get up. The first thing he'd noticed was that he could breathe a lot better, so he'd apparently spent the entire night with his face pressed into Gerard's side. He made a noise in lieu of words it was too early for. Gerard stilled. “Sorry.”, he whispered. “I need to pee.”  
“Mh.”  
Frank dozed off again briefly but was very happy to be awoken the next time around. He smelled coffee and inched closer to the other when he was done settling down. Gerard put an arm around him and held him close while, Frank guessed, he wasn't opening his eyes yet, he hoped to get back to sleep still, he started on his coffee.   
“Mikey's still asleep, I think.”, Gerard whispered. Frank smiled. He put an arm around Gerard's middle. He was as soft and warm like he had thought he would be. He smelled like washing detergent, frankincense, cold cigarette smoke and sleep. “Me too.”, Frank mumbled and felt Gerard exhale a soft laugh. “Good.” He gently squeezed his shoulder.   
Frank did not in fact fall back asleep. The thought of enjoying Gerard's company in the waking world was too tempting. And while cuddling was nice, he could be looking at him, too, and talking to him, and maybe kissing him even though morning breath was horrible. Maybe just a little.   
“Any spider dreams?”  
“No.”, said Gerard, smiling at him as Frank was freeing himself of the blanket. He looked so happy and soft, Frank stared at him for a moment before he leaned in to kiss him on the side of his mouth. “You're so fucking cute, man.”  
“Thanks.”, Gerard grinned, and Frank kissed his cheek and his jaw too before he sat up properly. He was still leaning on him heavily.   
“Can I get some of that?”, he asked, already taking the large, dark red cup out of Gerard's hand.   
“So that's what this is gonna be like?”, he grinned, and Frank nodded. “Absolutely.”  
“Thought so.”  
Frank didn't drink too much, both because it was hot and because he thought maybe holding back a little in the beginning of their blossoming relationship was a good idea. He gave the cup back to Gerard, who shook his head. “I'll make you one.”  
“Nah.”, said Frank and leaned into him more heavily. “Stay here, we can share.”  
Gerard smiled, a little pink in the face, as he took his mug back. “Okay.”  
“Thank you though.”  
“Yeah.”  
“Do you have work today?”  
“Uh – what – day is it?”  
Gerard snorted softly. “It's Tuesday.”  
“Oh. Yeah. Actually. I have a couple appointments later. How late is it?”  
“'s like 10?”, Gerard looked at him as though he was ready to jump out of bed immediately.  
“Aw, man.”  
“What? Do you need to leave?”  
“No, gotta leave at like 12. My first one's at one.”  
“Ah, okay. I'll drive you.”

They quietly shared their coffee for a while, until Frank had to go to the bathroom. He showered and they decided to go get breakfast because Mikey was still asleep. Gerard told him he'd woken him up when he'd knocked on his door to ask what he wanted. 

“He didn't look good, dude.”  
Gerard didn't either, now.  
“He's gonna be okay.”, said Frank, pulling his hoodie on.   
“I dunno.”  
“He is. He'll feel better when he ate something. Come on.”  
Frank wasn't actually too convinced of that, but he also didn't want to think about the alternative. Or any of the other crap. For once.


End file.
